LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE : 

A TREATISE ON 

ORGANIC AND INORGANIC MATTER : THE FINITE AND 
THE INFINITE : TRANSIENT AND ETERNAL LIFE. 



/ 

By WARREN CHASE. 

Author of '" Life Line of the Lone One,'" "Fugitive Wife," "American Crisis," 
and "Gist of Spiritualism." 



41 



Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; 

The soul that rises with us, our life's star, 
Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
And cometh from afar ; 
Not in entire forgetfulness, 
And not in utter nakedness, 
But, trailing clouds of glory, do we come 
From God, who is our home." 




BOSTON: 

COLBY & RICH, PUBLISHERS, 

Corner Bosworth and Province Sts. 

1886. 



.C5 




/ 



COPYRIGHTKD BY WARREN ClIASE, 188G. 



PREFACE 



In presenting this little work to the public, I do 
not claim any discovery, for I am aware that other 
speakers and writers have given to the public in vari- 
ous fragmentary utterances most, if not all, of the 
views expressed herein; but T do it more to leave 
my testimony in a permanent form, since my lect- 
ures, not having been written, and seldom reported, 
are rarely to be seen in print ; and as I am nearly 
through my earthly pilgrimage, I leave this a legacy 
of belief to my many friends. 

Wakren Chase. 

C3) 



INTRODUCTION. 



As I need no introduction to ray audiences, as a 
speaker, so this brochure will need no introduction, 
but pass on its own merits into, or through, the minds 
of those who read it : — 

"Countless chords of heavenly music 

Struck ere earthly time began, 
Vibrate in immortal concord 

To the answering soul of man ; 
Countless rays of heavenly glory 

Shine through spirit, pent in clay, 
On the wise men at their labors, 

On the children at their play. 
Man has gazed on heavenly secrets, 

Sunned himself in heavenly glow, 
Seen in glory, heard the music, — 

We are wiser than we know." 

Charles Mackay. 



(*) 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 



CHAPTER I. 



I shall start this treatise with a somewhat bold, 
and old, but incontrovertible assumption, which I 
accept as an axiom, viz., that whatever has one end 
must, necessarily, have two, whether measured in 
space or time, distance or duration. I shall adhere 
strictly to this as law throughout this treatise, and if 
I cannot find evidence sufficient to establish a belief 
in eternal life, with this law in full force, shall sur- 
render the point, and still retain the demonstrated 
and fully established fact of the spiritual life, as a 
continuation of this life after the soul casts off the 
body. Certainly, proof of spiritual life is not more 
proof of its eternal duration than is the fact of this 
life proof in itself that we shall live always here. 

My rule of measure, which determines ends from 
beginnings in all things, is certainly absolute and 
universal in all organic objects within the scope of 
scientific experiment and philosophic observation on 
our earth, and is apparent beyond it from the changes 
in planets also. The vegetable and animal kingdoms 

(5) 



G ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

each evidently revolves in its own sphere, and on its 
own axis, and in each every form that is burn dies; 
every organization is disorganized sooner or later, 
and though some forms vastly outlive and out- 
measure us, yet none outlive our capacity to deter- 
mine their ending; even the granite, the quartz, and 
the diamond must follow the law that produced them, 
and sooner or later the particles will be separated. 
Cohesion cannot forever bind any two or more parti- 
cles of gross matter into a form ; repulsion and segre- 
gation are as certain and absolute as attraction and 
aggregation. 

If, then, this law holds good in each and every 
form of matter in the three kingdoms below, — or 
inferior to man, and is equally apparent in, and more 
rapid in, the physical and ponderable form of man, 
also, — what argument, evidence, or reason have we 
here that a spiritual or elemental body is started 
into form and being here, and in this shell, that 
was, or is, dependent on it for existence? It sets 
aside the law of its own creation, and that which 
governs all other forms, and its shell, and, defy- 
ing time and decay, but not change, holds on to, 
and sets up, eternal life from that point ; or, rather, 
a life with but one end, — for it could not be eternal 
if it had one end; even if it was like the old symbol 
of eternity, the snake, with its tail in its mouth, for- 
ever swallowing itself, and yet endless. I confess my 
inability to see the evidence from analogy, or to find 
it in testimony, that the spirit life, which grows out 
of this, if it starts here, is to continue forever after 
without being renewed and started again. 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 7 

To me any theory or belief seems inconsistent and 
unreliable, however desirable, which teaches that the 
spirit or soul of man is made up from refined parti- 
cles of matter from the earth, and cast in the human 
mold of form, and, when taken out of the mold, is 
perfect ; or, being imperfect, becomes so, and is ever 
after indestructible, if not unchangeable. How a 
soul can be refined soil, or plant, or animal, and be 
no longer subject to the law that refined it, and ever 
governed both the forms and particles of which it 
was made, I cannot understand; but I can under- 
stand how the ignorant, bigoted, superstitious, and, 
often wicked, religious teachers would promise 
anything for their favorites and friends, and threaten 
any torments for enemies, and thus establish beliefs 
and creeds. The monarchy of Heaven and the 
tyranny of hell were little less inconsistent than the 
theory of unchangeable and endless life after death, 
— a never-ending song, and a never-ending Sabbath 
(of course, with preaching) ; but the time has come 
when rational minds must have some better evidence 
than Bible authority or creed doctrine. Faith and 
belief will not answer longer. We cannot accept the 
belief of a stupid dunce as evidence of its own truth, 
even if he assert that he has had his heart changed 
from nature to grace, and yet such, instead of philos- 
ophy, has been mainly the evidence not only of eter- 
nal life but of any life after death, as presented by 
the zealous Christians. Persons who, from their own 
vain imaginings, drag in a miracle to intercept 
natural law, and change the order of nature to 
secure their desires, are not worthy of notice, and, of 



8 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

course, are born to be deceived by their own false 
delusions. Those who hang a hope of immortality 
on the love of life and dread of death will find the 
hope hanging on a slender thread, as likely to be 
clipped as it is in the animal kingdom, which shows 
equally strong love of life. To satisfy the reasoning 
mind, some more substantial and reliable evidence 
must be furnished; and I am not entirely satisfied 
with the testimony of spirits, for it seems often vague, 
unsettled, and speculative, and, to a great extent, 
like the beliefs of those who live here. Sound phi- 
losophy seems almost as rare with those spirits who 
communicate through mediums as with our public 
teachers, and we seldom get new principles or theories 
from them through mediums until they have been 
announced by some normal speaker or writer; but 
after such announcement in one place, they are often 
taken up by mediums far from the place, and who 
never saw or heard of them, and then, to many, seem 
original. A truth having been born into expression 
somewhere, it is, no doubt, accessible to many spirits, 
and by them carried far and wide, and given out in 
many new places. But I am also satisfied that many 
ideas given by normal speakers are from the spirit 
world when we do not recognize that as the source, 
and no doubt they often originate there, for it is evi- 
dent that a large amount of impression and inspira- 
tion is received from spirits, and not credited. 

I will not take up every argument in favor of 
immortality, and show the fallacy of each; but since 
belief and desire are the Christian's basis and foun- 
dation of nearly all, and these being NO reliable evi- 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 9 

dence, I dispense with the whole of them at once. 
Claims of promise, by word of God and Bible author- 
ity, I do not consider worthy notice in a treatise of 
this kind, as they have no claims upon the stand- 
ard of reason, nor hardly upon that of common 
sense. 

Having cleared away and dispensed with the com- 
mon arguments for immortality, I may as well state 
here that I believe in the eternal existence of every 
human being, and, of course, that includes the past 
as well as the future of conscious or unconscious 
individualized existence. I believe in it from evi- 
dences not embraced in the above, and in no wise con- 
flicting with the axiom laid down at the start, and 
which I will endeavor to set forth as clearly as my 
control of language will allow. 



CHAPTER II. 

The universe consists of two distinct ingredients, 
which I call Essence and Substance, or Mind and 
Matter. The qualities, properties, and actions of 
each are distinct from the other, and yet they are 
blended throughout the universe. One originates 
motive, will-force, the other action-forms. Essence 
is simple, perfect, unchangeable, absolute, infinite, 
positive, masculine, is Law and God, and never in- 
creased or decreased in quantity, or changed in qual- 
ity. Its highest manifestation in our world is in 
intelligence, which is ever exhibited in finite degree, 
and in accordance with the peculiar structure of the 
organic form through which it is exhibited in person 
to person. It may not be improper to term Essence 
law, since law is God, and God is law, and not love, 
as is so frequently asserted. 

Substance is the covering of every germ of being, 
and the organic matter of every form ; its very name 
denotes its inferiority, — sub, inferior or under, stance. 
It, too, is never increased or decreased in quantity, 
or in its simples changed in quality, but in combina- 
tion and forms forever changing. In the simple cell 
that starts each organic being, essence is the germ, and 
substance is the covering, shell, globe, or globule ; 
and the same is true of worlds as of these minute 

(10) 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 11 

globules with life in them. All germs of existence 
are of the Divine Essence, and clothed upon, or draw- 
around them substance, — thus making forms, all of 
which change and decay. Substance is, of itself, 
inert ; essence, never. Matter never exhibits inertia 
to us, because it is forever and everywhere connected 
with and impelled by, essence, or God, as the strongly 
religious and slightly intellectual world more prop- 
erly say. All material which combines in forms of 
organic life is substance, and negative, and is every- 
where and forever kept in motion ; consequently, no 
form is of eternal duration, and no particle of sub- 
stance forever in the same place, or same connec- 
tion. All forms of outer being are ephemeral ; all 
combinations of substance temporary ; and hence all 
beings and things are changing and changeable, and 
no form eternal, whilst every 'particle, and simple 
part of every form, is eternal. Quantity and quality 
of essence and substance have never changed, and 
never can, neither can one ever supply the place of 
the other. Substance never becomes essence, essence 
never becomes substance. 

In the gradations of matter, one kingdom feeds and 
supplies the forms of another, — mineral the vegetable, 
vegetable the animal, animal the human, human the 
spiritual ; but in the volitions of soul or essence, one 
kingdom does not supply another, but each revolves 
in its own orbit, bringing out motion in the mineral, 
life in the vegetable, sensation in the animal, intel- 
ligence in the human, and harmony in the spirit- 
ual. Manifestations that are highest in one kingdom 
appear as lower in the next, which adds its own 



12 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

peculiar feature, — thus life reappears in the animal, 
but does not come from the vegetable, and sensation 
reappears in the human, but does not come from the 
animal to the human. I use the terms high and low 
in this treatise as they are used in ordinary conver- 
sation, not because they exist in the absolute, but 
only in the relative. High and low are only the 
discrete or distinct degrees by which one condition is 
marked to designate it from another. What we call 
high and low might as well be reversed, and be as 
appropriate terms to respective conditions, as pro- 
gression is only change. A horse with his four feet 
is perfect to the horse ; a man, with only two, is im- 
perfect ; and so of each form of existence, which, to 
itself, is highest. To the infinite there is no high or 
low, good or bad; hence, of course, what we call 
progression is only change. There is no general law 
by which to distinguish high from low, certainly not 
by length or duration of form, or, if so, rocks and 
trees have superiority over animals and man in the 
aggregate. It is not yet certain what is the general 
duration of spirit forms, since we have but recently 
ascertained for a certainty that such really exist, and 
are a continuation of human life and form in bodies 
composed of sensation which seems to enter but 
slightly into the composition of their bodies, if it is 
to be found at all in them, but which is a part of the 
universe of substance as much as that which com- 
poses these bodies.' Experiments have not yet been 
successful in establishing the nature and composition 
of the materials that compose spirit bodies, but no 
doubt will be in time ; but there is certainly no proba- 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 13 

bility that any discovery will be made that will prove 
these materials are not subject to the general law of 
change of partners as particles of matter, and conse- 
quent aggregation and segregation, or life and death 
of forms, to which law essence is not subject, and 
consequently when a tree dies its soul does not die, 
— its form dies ; the life which was wkh that form 
is as real after as before its death, and is not even 
changed, only the shell that for a time surrounded it 
has dropped off, while the real tree, so far as life is 
concerned, remains as permanent as before its death, 
and before it had the covering of earthy matter. The 
soul germs of all organic bodies exist forever, and 
before and after the forms are put on and off. They 
are never seen, for only substance, and that only in 
combination, is visible as a form. Reduced to its 
simples, substance is out of the reach of mortals, if 
not of spiritual vision. Substances cohere and pro- 
duce all the varieties of compound forms. Essences 
are individual sovereignties ; the essence of a tree is 
forever a tree; the essence of a horse is forever a 
horse ; the essence of a man is forever a man, — each 
absolute or eternal, whether clothed upon by form in 
matter or not. All germs of being are of and in God, 
a part of the Divine Mind of the universe, which, in 
part and whole, is eternal and unchangeable. Every 
human being is eternally human ; never sinks below 
or rises above its grade or sphere of being ; but may 
sink or float on, or in, its kingdom, and rise to the 
top or sink to the bottom of its kingdom, but can 
never be an animal nor a winged angel, but may be 
an angel without wings, for such are human, as the 



14 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

term embraces all forms that were within its physio- 
logical law. No human soul germ ever was or ever 
will be any other than a human soul germ, sometimes 
with, and sometimes without, a material form or 
clothing in substance, and sometimes with an imper- 
fect, and sometimes with a perfect, one ; and ever 
with corresponding faculties, powers, expressions, and 
sufferings or enjoyments, — all of which pertain to, 
and are uttered in and through, the form. Essential 
existence is eternal existence, and is the divine life 
that was and is, and is to be forever the same perfect, 
pure, holy, and unchangeable " yesterday, today, and 
forever " the same. Man is individualized in essence, 
hence is immortal ; he involuntarily and unconsci- 
ously secretes and combines substance in form, which 
is forever the human form, and could be no other 
with or without will, because such is the form of the 
essence, — soul germ. 

Immortality and identity of being exist only in 
essence and germ, never in substance or material 
compound. The one essential — a divine property, 
life, of the soul — remains intact through all changes 
of clothing and variations of combination which 
make up the complicated and ever-changing matter 
that robes the soul germ during its eternal life ; for, 
as it is divine, it partakes of the divine perfection. 
Immortalit}^ of essence exists equally in the animal 
and vegetable kingdoms as in the human, and. each 
is, and must, be robed in material forms upon its own 
plane of being. Plants must forever be plants if 
they have forms, and horses must ever be horses if 
the soul germ have a form, and each form must live 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 15 

upon, and in, its own element and aliment; and as 
horses, cattle, and swine would be greatly out of 
place in the elegant parlors of man and woman on 
earth, so they would be much more out of place in 
the still more elegant homes of the spirit life to which 
man is so appropriately fitted both in form and feel- 
ing. That the spirit world has trees and plants, and 
flowers, and birds, and beasts, is evident from the 
testimony of nearly all spirits that communicate to 
us from that life ; but their forms, evidently, are 
indigenous to the sphere, as are some animals to 
the different periods, climates, and localities of our 
world. Some germs may go from this life and be 
reclothed there, but a majority do not go from the 
stables, styes, and kennels of this sphere with con- 
tinued, conscious identity and individuality as man 
does from his palaces, kennels, and huts. Indeed, it 
is doubtful whether any animal has conscious individ- 
uality at all, as consciousness is a quality dependent 
on peculiarity of form and material as well as on soul 
germ, and is transient even in the highest condition 
attainable by man, so far as we yet know. Consci- 
ousness is not essential to existence more in man or 
beast than in trees, and is ever incidental. Memory 
is a power of reflection, or reproduction, weak in 
some men, strong in others, and the same in animals, 
and never subject to the will, but capable of cultiva- 
tion in both man and beast. It exists only in the 
higher orders of animals and in man, and in man it 
is a failing institution by which he is ever dropping 
the past, and recalling it few or many times, and at 
last getting out of reach of each event entirely, as the 



16 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

accumulations become too numerous between the 
occurrence and the present. We drag some events, 
by memory, over a vast amount of rubbish, and 
recall them often, and many times, but lose them at 
last, and it is well we do, else our load would encum- 
ber us more than the pack of Bunyan's fabled pil- 
grim. That memory fails to recall events of the past 
centuries is not evidence that we had no conscious 
existence, and no full or complete forms in those 
remote ages of anterior existence both of ourselves 
and our world. The souls of things keep no record 
of time or events. Records are kept on, and in, the 
forms as scars are on the body, and not on the spirit 
of mortals ; so memory is on the form, and pertains 
to it. Our spirit life would carry no record of this 
were it not begun here with this and the spirit body 
already formed, and written upon in this life. As 
the soul germ, or mind, brought no body to this 
planet, or cycle of life, it brings no scrip of memory- 
record from another or anterior life ; but I put no 
dependence on any such transient and ephemeral 
evidences of existence, or non-existence. If there is 
a spark of the Divine in us, it must partake of the 
Divine nature and being itself; so much of God must 
be so far perfect and unchangeable ; and as God 
works in the universe to ultimate ends from begin- 
nings of forms, so this spark, or soul germ, must 
work, from its God-like nature, though unconsciously, 
to the end of creating and ultimating a form, — a 
human form, — and as it possesses this inherent 
power, and ever did, it must have been forever work- 
ing out forms in the ever-changing matter of the uni- 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 17 

verse, each and all of which must have been like our 
present bodies, of short duration, while the soul, or 
mind, was eternal, unchangeable, and eternally the 
same both in nature, power, and action. 

But at this stage of our search after eternal life 
many questions naturally arise in the mind, and must 
be met by some reasonable solution, or our theory is 
like a ship on the ocean without compass or beacon- 
light. What and where were we, each one, a thou- 
sand years ago ? To a Christian, I would reply, by 
asking : What, and where, was God before the begin- 
ning, spoken of in the first chapter of Genesis? But 
to a skeptic and inquirer I would suggest that, as all 
matter is eternal, we might have had forms in some 
of the older worlds of the universe, and from them 
emigrated to this new one to seek our fortunes in 
the spheres that surround this crusted globe, enter- 
ing first in the crust. The lethean stream through 
which we passed on our journey here having washed 
off our old bodies, with every speck of the memory- 
record, the soul germ begins its form here anew, and 
picks up its items slowly for a new library of events 
to fill up the shelves of memory, and ultimately to be 
again destroyed, perhaps not for millions of centuries, 
or may be within one century. Where I shall be 
one thousand 3-ears hence is as unsettled and uncer- 
tain as where I was one thousand years ago, so both 
are really speculative ; yet facts and philosophy fur- 
nish good grounds for a life of an immortality, at 
least better than any the Christian has yet fur- 
nished. 

It has long been known that the germs of all 



18 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

organic forms in our world are single and simple 
cells, or "hollow globes," or containing protoplasm 
and life force that we cannot detect with the eye; 
the soul germ which works out and develops the 
form, provided suitable material is at hand, and 
within reach of its powers of attraction, if not, the 
form is an abortion, and the cell destroyed, while the 
essence remains in its perfection awaiting another 
covering of substance, or matter, in which to ulti- 
mate its form, whether of plant, beast, or man. Each 
kingdom of beings ultimates and revolves in its own 
sphere ; plants, rooted in earth, and ultimated in 
atmosphere, revolve therein, and fulfill their mission 
and reach perfection in, and on, our earth, and lose 
identity to us with dissolution of form, but never to 
God ; hence, all plants that exist exist forever. 
Animals evidently follow the same law, for both 
show powers of reaching into an elemental or 
spiritual life. Religious aspiration and intelli- 
gent reflection arc entirely wanting in both these 
kingdoms, while in man they are universal attri- 
butes of the race, and 3'et man is supposed to go on 
without it. Man does not ultimate, ripen, or decay 
in this sphere, even though his earthly shell does, 
and breaks only to let the real man out and into his 
sphere of real life to ripen and perfect. 

Man is evidently only in the gestation state of his 
real life while in earthy substance or an earthy body, 
and is newly born at death; and a great majority 
from our country, at this time, are prematurely born, 
greatly to their disadvantage, except in cases where 
this life is so perverted from its true purpose as to 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 19 

render it almost or entirely useless to the soul, which, 
is not unfrequently the case. The necessity of plant- 
ing souls here to germinate and start a spiritual body 
is the same as for planting seed in the ground, or 
birds in the egg, before starting to flutter and fly; 
but the spiritual body that clothes the essence, or 
mind — the soul germ — is also substance, or mat- 
ter, ephemeral and changeable, as is most conclu- 
sively established by the testimony that those who 
enter that life from an infancy or feebleness here, 
change, grow, strengthen, and increase in form and 
powers there. In its appropriate place, the physical 
body starts, and, if not obstructed, Alls out its meas- 
ure and growth on earth and in air, and in it, as a 
womb or chrysalis shell, the spirit starts and fills out 
its manhood or womanhood in the 'sphere of ether 
and element that surrounds this globe, and ends its 
career there as the earthly body does here ; but the 
mind or soul germ is there, as here, independent of 
the form, perfect, unchangeable, eternal, it being a 
part — finite part — of the Infinite Divine mind of 
the universe. Each soul germ of us may have, nay, 
must have, lived through countless worlds, and sys- 
tems of worlds, and may or may not be now on its 
first and last pilgrimage to this little planet and its 
spiritual spheres of discreted degrees, and when 
ripened in the outer circle of earth's spiritual atmos- 
phere will as willingly lay off its body, and passing 
the lethean river that divides this planet and its 
inhabitants from the next, begin a new form, and 
enter organic existence on the next, or on some one 
of the numberless worlds, and run its career through 



20 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

tin 4 circles and cycles of that, and thus on and on 
through the endless extent of worlds and time. 

Such, I conceive, to be eternal life, and by this 
theory — for it is nothing else — it can be seen at 
once that the essence of man is not progressive, but 
perfect, as part of God, if we choose to call essence 
God. Progression is only temporary, — a relative 
growth and development of form and manifestation 
of powers in it ; but to God, and soul essence, is only 
outward change of no vital importance to either, as 
it produces no change in either, or on the destiny 
of the essence of any soul incased in form of sub- 
stance. 

Many will object to this theory, because they are 
to lose in the lethean river of transition the mem- 
ory pictures collected in the life and experiences of 
each stage ; but we cannot accommodate a theory to 
the likes or dislikes, or whims of feeling, in one or 
many. No doubt, the law is such as to give us the 
greatest amount of enjoyment in the long race that 
we are capable of, and that the Infinite Divine, or 
Divine mind, has perfection in all its parts, including 
man. 

There is an ancient philosophy of immortality 
somewhat resembling this, said to have been taught 
by, if not starting from, Pythagoras, a very wise 
philosopher of ancient Greece, and also by Kreeshna, 
of the Hindoos; but it taught that what we call 
death is the return of essence to its unconscious 
condition in the Divine mind, but we have abundance 
of proof, both by testimony and scientific fact and 
philosophical deductions that it is not so. That the 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 21 

spirit life as a, or the, real life of man is now fully 
established, but that the spirit spheres that now sur- 
round this earth, and may contain all the spirits that 
ever lived on it, are to remain permanent, and catch 
every spirit as it bursts its shell of clay, and that 
they are to remain the same when our earth has 
melted away in electric light and heat is simply 
absurd. It is true there is room enough in the belt 
of ether around our planet for a vastly greater num- 
ber of spirits than have yet entered it from earth ; 
but time would fill and overstock it if the race ran 
on as it is now running, increasing, and sending 
over there the spirit germs, unless many should 
prove, as some able writers assert, to be abortions, 
and never appear there. Equally absurd is the idea 
that spirits are manufactured on our earth, finished 
up, varnished, and labeled in the spirit sphere around 
it, and then sent off missionarying among the planets 
and fixed stars to relate the story how Jesus was 
crucified, and saved man by his death from his totally 
depraved nature, which otherwise would have kept 
these very souls in confinement and misery forever. 
This earth is not a place where immortal spirits are 
manufactured for a roaming existence through infi- 
nite extent to meet and visit other spirits made up 
on other worlds, and thus singly, or in pairs, or fami- 
lies, or tribes, go trailing through the infinite heav- 
ens, like Indians in the forests of our country before 
European discovery reached it. 

The generally received theory of the origin of man 
among Christians is that two persons, male and 
female, start the organic existence of each human 



22 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

being, while God, at some period not defined, but at 
or soon after the commencement of the body, puts a 
new soul into it which had no existence before, yet 
never ceases to exist after, but leaves the body at its 
death, and enters upon an unchangeable state of exist- 
ence for eternity, in misery or happiness, according as 
it had been successful or unsuccessful in overcoming 
its totally depraved nature, in which it was made, 
and with which it was clothed in the body as the 
result of the sinful act of parents, — some say of the 
first pair, and first act of the kind, — and some lay it 
to the act that started the body, with its depraved 
nature. A large portion, however, believe that the 
Devil is the author and creator of the wicked souls, 
which are the tares sown by him, as it is said in the 
Scriptures, and that a large part of the souls are his 
offspring, and, consequently, wicked as the bodies 
are, and inherit endless misery as a reward for being 
born, over which event they had no control. All vari- 
eties of these Christian theories teach that man has 
no voluntary action or choice in entering upon this 
existence, yet is made accountable and responsible 
for not altering his depraved nature. Whether these 
souls are made up out of nothing, as our world is 
said to have been, or are sparks of God, thus lessen- 
ing his being so much each time, we are not informed. 
Of all the theories of soul and soul-life, ancient and 
modern, none is more ridiculous, unreasonable, and 
absurd than the general belief of Christians. Bodies 
made up of earthly matter die, dissolve, and are 
scattered, and then are to be collected, resurrected, 
and live forever, even though the same particles have 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 23 

lived and died in scores of different bodies ; yet God 
can do as he pleases, and make the same particle of 
matter fill a score of places in as many bodies at the 
same time, and these renovated bodies are to be 
deathless, and not subject to such losses as operate 
on them before death, and are to live somewhere that 
is now nowhere, in a heaven of joy or hell of misery 
forever and ever. Souls that God made, of which 
He is father, are a part of them, to return to Him in 
or out of these bodies, and enjoy bliss forever, and 
another part are given to His enemy, and tormented 
by that enemy forever for not doing, or for doing, as 
they were obliged to do in this life by an inexorable 
fate. Souls that are both something and nothing at 
the same time, and somewhere and nowhere at the 
same time, children of both God and the Devil, one 
furnishing the nature and the body, and the other 
the soul or germ, or each furnishing both; so on 
through an almost endless range of absurdities runs 
Christianity with its six hundred sectarian headings. 

If this theory of immortality is not more rational 
and consistent than any one taught by Christians, as 
a doctrine, it must share their fate, and disappear in 
a more intelligent age. 

If the essence of the universe is not particled in 
forms of eternal durability, then all forms of being 
in their soul germs are blended and lost in the uni- 
versal Godhead, or Divine Mind ; but if the Divine 
essence contains an infinite variety of never-ending, 
never-changing, never-varying germs of form, which 
are ever seeking conditions and working out organic 
coverings in substance, and ever suffering and enjoy- 



24 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

ing in each according to its condition and relation to 
other objects, then we have the secret and key to all 
the manifestations we witness in our ever-changing 
and ever-varying world, and the kingdoms of beings 
about it. 

Forms, center, circumference, diameter, location, 
time, and all such terms, apply to all individualities 
in substance, and the same in essence, in whole or in 
part, but no form can be detected by us, except in 
substance. Yet germs of form abound everywhere, 
and are ever ready to concentrate and cohere parti- 
cles when material is in reach, — for plant in its 
sphere, beast in its sphere, or man in his. Man does 
not vary from the law, and would not escape from 
the earth, and would end in death were he not by 
nature a spiritual being, beginning his form of soul 
and soul life here as soon and as effectually as he 
does his body and its life. He revolves in his sphere, 
which is a spiritual or elemental one, and the beast 
does in his, which may be a sensual and sensuous 
one. Man never is satisfied with this life ; feed him 
to satiety, he is hungry still; quench his thirst, and 
still it burns into his being's core ; give him power, 
and lie wants more ; give him riches, and he is more 
and more afraid of poverty, and craves and craves 
forever something he has not. This is not his 
sphere. Animals can be fed to satiety, and content ; 
man cannot. His restless spirit hungers and thirsts 
for the aliment it cannot reach on earth or in gross 
matter; but only in the spiritual world, where lie is 
at home, or can reach a home of content, and can 
be satisfied. Love is an element of this world, and 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 25 

aliment of the spirit and spirit world, and so deranged 
in this life as to seldom satisfy the human demand. 
Most of those who require and need it fail to get it, 
and most of those who have it bestow it so badly 
and improperly as to do about as much injury as 
good with it. In our restless, turbulent world, love 
seems to create nearly as much misery as happiness, 
yet even here we could not dispense with it ; but in 
our real life it will act as important part as air does 
here, feeding the system with a necessary ingredient 
of life. In the rudest and coarsest condition of earth 
life, man is so near the animal as to show little signs 
of his kinship with spirit life ; yet in every stage is 
the germ of spirit, or soul germ, working out an ele- 
mental form to have a form for its true and real life 
in the spiritual spheres. 

There are among Christian believers in immortality 
the most vague and indefinite ideas of spirit life, 
with scarcely a ray of consistency. Few of them 
have any definite idea of form and substance in the 
soul or spirit, and none that I ever met with have 
any locality for heaven or hell. What souls are, 
and where they live, is only to be believed in, not to 
be carried farther, as that would be too inquisitive 
for God's goodness, and He would be angry at us, as 
infidels, for using our intellects to know the particu- 
lars ; but, as skeptics or Spiritualists, we are bound 
to have a consistent belief, and know all we can of 
particulars. A. J. Davis has given a very rational 
and consistent theory of body, soul, and spirit, which 
I somewhat reverse in description by starting with 
mind, or essence, which corresponds to his theory of 



26 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

spirit, and spirit form which corresponds to his soul 
or elemental form, spirit body, us most Spiritualists 
call it, and earthly body, on which we, of course, all 
agree, except, perhaps, that I believe it to be the 
effect of the soul germ, or essence, which was in 
itself as complete before as after, and as perfect, and 
which, lodged in the congenial soil, at once began to 
surround itself with a body of substance. I do not 
agree with other writers on the point of origin. I 
cannot conceive of the streams of being rising so far 
above their fountains as to have spirit life or forms 
arise from, or flow out of, this earthly life as mate- 
rial eliminated and refined from minerals, by passing 
through plants, animals, and man's body till fine 
enough for souls, and, lastly, for spirit essence, and 
of course at last to make gods ; if this is true of the 
body, it cannot be of the immortal part. To me it 
seems far more reasonable that God, or essence, is 
perfect and complete, and does not grow out of 
earthy matter, nor can I more clearly see how the 
soul germ, or essence, of man, which is the Divine in 
him, could be eliminated from refined matter. Mat- 
ter in combination could by no process of refinement 
rise above its simples, or be more pure than when in 
its primary condition. All the refinement it could 
attain would be to fall back to its original condition 
of simple and inert matter, in which condition each 
particle would still contain essence in its pure and 
germinating condition, ever reaching out its feelers 
of attraction for other particles to join it, and build 
a form in combinations of substance in some one of 
the infinite variety of forms that forever people the 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 27 

universe, the essence of no one of which ever dies or 
is ever lost, or ever leaves its orbit to take on a 
different form from the one of the kingdom to which 
it belongs, bat which may vary and range in its own 
kingdom sufficiently to be from the same germ, wheat 
or dust, oats or barley, maize or smut, horse or mule, 
duck or goose, Indian or Negro, Caucasian or Malay, 
but never to rise over its kingdom, and be in one age 
a horse and next a man, or first a tree aud then a 
horse, as this involves the crossing of a line that for- 
ever separates forms of being. Each kingdom 
revolves in its own orbit in essence as in substance, 
and hence man is man forever, and beast beast, and 
plant, plant through all the eternal round of endless 
changes that pertain to being. 

The great point of discovery is to establish the 
boundaries of kingdoms and the orbits in which they 
revolve, and to settle the question of transitions. 
Science has placed in our hands some well-established 
facts in the species below, if not in ours. Worms to 
butterflies, tadpoles to frogs, wigglers to mosquitoes, 
ants with wings, and a host of other facts, all go to 
show that man may cast his shell, or skin, and soar 
away to his real life, as the articulata so often do, 
and that this may only be the "ante-natal tomb 
where " spirits " dream of the life to come," since 
it has been ascertained that the simple elements of 
matter may cohere and form bodies as remote from 
our physical senses as the ethereal particles are. 
Hence it is no longer a mystery how we may live on 
when death takes the body; nor is it strange that 
the spirit world should be a sphere in which forms 



28 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

grow, ripen, and decay, subject to the laws of ele- 
mental life which certainly may as well supply the 
growth of forms, and waste of forms, as those which 
govern physical lii'e and growth here. But if we 
would fix a bound to growth and decay, and estab- 
lish a fixed condition from which there was no 
change through eternity, we must certainly introduce 
a miracle, or a new law, not yet known to mortals, 
and most especially wonderful if it could keep the 
joints of an organic being like man lubricated with 
oil forever, and establish in his form a perpetual 
motion that should run forever without supply or 
waste. Such law is not yet known to operate in any 
sphere except the miraculous and fabulous sphere of 
the Christian's imaginary heaven and hell. 

If the spirit world of our and other globes were 
eliminated and refined particles from the solid por- 
tions, and entered into the fixed and unchangeable 
bodies of spirits or souls, however slow the process, 
the whole amount of material would ultimately be 
made up into souls, and the process stop for want of 
material, if from no other cause ; and, indeed, if the 
process had been going on through all past time it 
would have used it all up long before this period, and 
creation would have stopped, unless the Infinite 
Mind could make new material out of nothing to 
supply the place of that made up into souls. Any 
process of exhaustion of the material must, of neces- 
sity, unless it stop, use up any given or limited quan- 
tity, as we know the globes to be ; hence that theory 
is fallacious, or self-destroying. If, on the other 
hand, the souls, after passing a long period in the 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 29 

refined state, and enjoying mostly a range of ele- 
mental being, are to be set back into fluids, liquids, 
solids, and, finally, disintegrated particles of matter 
appear again for another visit in .the elysian cham- 
bers of a new celestial heaven, and thus go round 
and round in this endless chain of conscious and 
unconscious being, the theory at least is consist- 
ent, if at first repulsive, to the finer feelings of 
a sensitive person. We do not crave an existence 
again in rocks and trees, if we have been there, nor 
do we want to go back to saurians or monkeys, if 
we came from them, — Which we do not believe, but 
we have no objection to going back to God our Father. 
We can accept the theory that our bodies, which are 
of vegetable and animal origin, should return, if we 
escape, intact, as souls, and are not dragged back 
with them ; and when we have exhausted man and 
womanhood, we can consent to begin again in child- 
hood, only let us always be working out and devel- 
oping human forms, if in a world of substance. To 
me the theory seems rational and simple, that each 
grade of matter, and each kingdom of beings, con- 
tinues in itself, material never in any sense decreas- 
ing or increasing in quantity or quality, combina- 
tions forever doing it, and returning each cast off 
particle to its own kingdom, whether a soul germ of 
human form or a particle of the body, or a soul germ 
of animal or plant. Yet, I cannot see why a germ of 
plant may not range its kingdom from the crypto- 
gamous mosses and ferns to the pine, the apple, or 
the peach ; nor why the animal germ may not range 
its kingdom, from the toad to the elephant, from the 



30 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

wren to the eagle, or from the rabbit to the horse; nor 
why human soul germs may not be born under such 
widely different circumstances, and with such widely 
different surroundings as to develop a Negro or 
Malay, a red or white man or woman, a base scoundrel 
or a bright, intelligent, virtuous man or woman. 
I do not see why souls may not range the whole 
kingdom of human forms, and be in germ, or essence, 
the same, and always perfect, — as parts of a Divine 
Mind, which is perfect in the aggregate, as each part 
in itself must be, of the same nature. 

Perhaps the most difficult point to establish in this 
theory is the individuality and identity of each 
human germ of soul and body, whether in or out of 
a form of substance. Without this we should, of 
course, be lost and swallowed up in the Divine vor- 
tex of being, and have no chance of individual rec- 
ognition. In whatever combination you find matter 
or substance, it is in particles, and these are never 
destroyed by any combination, analysis, or separa- 
tion ; and, if these particles have specific forms, and 
never lose or change them, why may not the same 
be true of mind, or essence, as of substance, and why 
may not these germs be the real germs that never 
lose their form or capacity to develop such in outer 
expression ? To me it seems both rational and con- 
sistent that it should be so. By this theory I can 
surmount all the obstacles to immortality of soul or 
mind. Yet some will think it nearly equal to anni- 
hilation to forget the past in each succeeding stage 
of being; but to a comprehensive mind there is little 
of the earth life worth remembering for a very long 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 31 

time. We easily forget the tops, and dolls, and toys 
of childhood, and the feelings we once had for and 
toward them, as we ripen in years ; and certainly 
there is nothing in our business or social relations of 
life here that bears a stronger or more lasting resem- 
blance in relation to our spiritual future than the 
toys of childhood to ripe man and womanhood ; even 
our earth is of not much more account in the uni- 
verse and range of eternity than the new top of the 
boy of five or six years' experience in this life is to 
him. Even in the little time we stay here our 
feelings entirely change, often so that we sometimes 
hate intensely the very object or person we a few 
years before loved intensely. Not only do our feel- 
ings change, but we also grow cold, neglectful, and 
forget the most lovely and delightful partners of our 
earlier years. Some people think somehow they are 
to be made to love eternally, and know forever the 
objects that are at the time the objects of love and 
knowledge ; but if they wait ten or ten thousand 
years, the love has changed, and the objects are 
passed by in neglect. Why, then, should death put 
a stop to these changes, and fix forever the objects 
that are dear to us, or surround us at that time, and 
leave all forgotten objects, and the feelings we had 
for them, entirely and forever out? Or will death 
renew all our earlier loves and recollections, and 
keep them before us forever ? Or will it only bring 
up the loved, and lovely objects, and leave out the 
hate and hateful ? To me it seems we must be con- 
sistent in our theories to sustain them. Truly, we 
carry forward memories to the spirit life, because 



82 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

this is a part of it; but we have brought none here 
with the essence of our being as it entered the cell 
to form this body, because it was stripped of its sub- 
stantial form on which it had recorded them, lost the 
tables of stone on which the commands were written, 
and hence brought no Bible with it from the world 
it inhabited before, washed off all the stains in the 
lethean river through which it walked on its journey 
to the earth. 

Edward Beecher, and other writers of some celeb- 
rity, talk about "new-created minds," as if some 
power was creating minds out of nothing, as it is said 
to have created our world, at the beginning of time, 
out of nothing ; but such folly of expression in our 
intellectual age is unworthy of notice. Such bundles 
of folly, absurdity, and nonsense as Mr. Beecher's 
Conflict of Ages is worth only its weight for paper 
rags in an age of reason and intellect. 

Theological writers often speak of the conscious- 
ness of the mind. The mind has no consciousness of 
itself. Consciousness is a faculty of the organization, 
and may be opened and shut almost as readily as the 
eyes, and has no effect on existence, or even on life. 
We are as really alive when asleep as when awake, and 
yet consciousness has no cognizance of this material 
life or action at the time. In fact, we are really uncon- 
scious about one-third of our lives, and yet the ma- 
chinery runs as well in one state as the other; but the 
mind does not sleep, nor are its powers or functions 
diminished. We can rest upon the fact that individ- 
ual existence does not depend upon consciousness or 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 33 

memory of past events, as we can surely live without 
either. 

Nearly every intelligent person will admit the 
Divine origin of the essence, or soul, of each human 
being, and claim a parentage in God for all men ; but 
most persons are content to assert their belief, and 
give no theory or law by which it can be so. They 
usually leave the whole subject shrouded in mystery 
about as absurd as the line of descent from David to 
Joseph, by which the New-Testament writers proved 
that Jesus was of the seed of David, when Joseph was 
not his father ; but the Scripture must be fulfilled, 
and so it was, even though a mystery to us. I am 
not content to stop with a belief unless I can show 
at least a reasonable argument for it ; hence I put 
out these propositions: The essence of each human 
being is in, and of, the Divine and Infinite and uni- 
versal Mind, and must be, like it, eternal, perfect, and 
unchangeable. 

Christians who admit the Divine origin of the soul 
must hang on one of these three positions if they 
attempt an explanation : 1st. The soul germ, being 
of Divine origin, may be made up, de novo, for each 
being out of nothing by the will and power of God. 
2nd. It may be made up for each being out of raw 
material already existing, in which case it must be 
composed of parts, or particles. 3rd. It may be a 
unit which has eternally existed in the Divine Mind, 
and is not changed by entering into the organic form 
of a human being. The first of these involves an 
impossibility as well as absurdity, and is, therefore, 
rejected at once; for it is a well-settled fact that 



34 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

nothing can never become something, even by Divine 
power, nor can something ever be reduced to noth- 
ing by any power; so we will dismiss the idea of 
"new-made" minds or souls from material which 
did not before exist. Next comes a more consistent 
and possible proposition : that the soul germ, or 
essence, of each human being is made up and consti- 
tuted of parts or particles, as is the first simple cell 
from which starts the body of each human being, and 
that these particles are in, and of, the Divine essence, 
pure and perfect forever, but only having individ- 
uality, consciousness, and accountability when com- 
bined and clothed upon by an earthly or spiritual 
body. I cannot refute this theory; it is not only 
possible but plausible, and may be true ; but, if so, we 
lose our eternal life, and the axiom which I started 
with cuts off both body and soul, and even soul germ, 
of each form, and we fall back in particles into the 
great vortex of Divine essence, perhaps each, or a 
part, of the particles to be again united in some other 
soul, or never more to be clothed with a material 
garment. But whether so or not, it is equally an 
end to us and to individuality forever. Persons who 
cannot, or will not, reason upon such subjects may 
accept the first absurdity, and may as well append 
eternal life to it as not, for it could not be more 
ridiculous by increasing the quantity of absurdities 
when the quality is the same. Persons who accept 
the second cannot append the eternal life without 
bringing in a miracle, and, by a stretch of Divine 
power, reversing a law of nature, set up a continual 
existence in opposition to all other facts and experi- 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 35 

ences and an axiom in philosophy. I cannot do this, 
and hence, if I accept the first proposition, I must 
lose the entity and identity of each human being 
at some period of time. I do, at least in my feel- 
ings, most cordially accept, and willingly believe in, 
the third proposition, — that each soul germ of a 
human or spiritual being is a single and simple parti- 
cle of the Divine Mind, and, consequently, indivisi- 
ble, indestructible, unchangeable, and eternally a 
human or spiritual 'soul germ, — ever active, and by 
inherent, unconscious, involuntary powers is forever 
working out, or reaching after, a form of matter in 
substance, and will ever have one when material is 
within reach to compose it, — ever has, and ever will, 
periodically live in some outward garment in human 
form, if not shut out from material which, in the uni- 
verse, is abundant. Hence, I see no reason why each 
soul germ may not have had millions of bodies, and 
have millions more, and, in fact, let its eternal life 
run through the ephemeral forms forever and ever, 
dropping each for a new start, as the cycles of time 
carry it through each world and planet, with its sur- 
rounding spiritual spheres. 

If all germs of being have their individual and 
eternal existence in the Divine Essence, and are 
unchangeable particles of the Infinite, with the ever- 
failing and ephemeral outer forms of matter con- 
stantly dressing and undressing the soul germ, which 
works and lives and enjoys existence, be true, then, 
surely, we have a consistent and clear explanation of 
ephemeral and eternal life ; and even though we may 
dislike to lose consciousness and memory of events, 



36 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

now fresh and strong, yet we have experience enough 
in both to enable us to be so used to it as to bear up 
under the inexorable fate that gives us eternal life, 
and changes our locality and partners, surroundings, 
and attractions. 

Incident to this belief arises the question of Divine 
consciousness, motive, will, design, etc. These may 
all be full, complete, perfect in the Infinite Divine 
Mind, and yet not in its parts ; no one organ of the 
human body or brain has either of these faculties of 
itself, nor has the soul germ ; yet, with suitable and 
perfect conditions of form and parts, each shows 
itself in us. Yet I cannot see the law which gives 
voluntary and absolute power to the Divine Mind. 
I cannot better illustrate my position on this point 
than by a conversation I once had with a D. D., at 
the head of one of our colleges. He accused me of 
fatalism, because I did not believe God could do all 
or anything whether possible in itself or not; said he 
was not a fatalist, and believed God could, and did, 
do as He wished, etc. ; but upon my asking him if 
he believed God could annihilate Himself, and all 
existence, he answered: "NO," and, of course, at 
once became a fatalist with me. So must most rea- 
soned who follow this subject, and will at last admit 
that God is Law, and Law is God. All we can know 
of God is by discovering and knowing the laws of our 
own and other existences. We never had a word of 
communication from God, except in these laws, and, 
indeed, it would be more ridiculous for God to talk 
to or communicate with a finite being, if it were pos- 
sible, than for a man to talk to his toes or the hairs 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 37 

of his head. But still further is this from fact than 
ridiculousness could make it. It is impossible ; for 
essence can only communicate to essence in its own 
language, — finite to finite, and Infinite to Infinite. 
Trees communicate to trees, as they propagate only 
vegetable in vegetable ; so is their language,— beast 
to beast, and man with man. We set up no schools 
for dogs or horses, although we do break and train 
them ; yet they do not progress into education, nor 
talk, think, reflect, reason, and argue with us ; and 
man has even less capacity to correspond with Deity, 
or to get language to and from the Divine Mind. 
Fables and human assumption prove nothing, as 
they are not evidence at all. I shall not bring in 
any person's opinion to support my theory, if there 
be any; for, although such is the common custom of 
writers, to me the opinions or beliefs of others are 
not authority, nor shall I fill up my book with the 
texts of Bible or other books, for these are no author- 
ity to me ; hence, I have only to place my views, 
opinions, and conclusions before the reader, and leave 
others free to do the same, and each reader to use his 
own reason and judgment on them, and accept or 
reject as seemeth right and proper; but I shall 
greatly need Scripture, and other texts and extracts, 
to fill out as large a volume as most authors would 
make to set forth even half the theory I shall put 
out in this. My subject, also, utterly precludes 
scientific demonstration by chemical or other experi- 
ments, and comes rather to the reader as a metaphys- 
ical or philosophical treatise. What A, B, or C said 
or believed on this subject must be sought elsewhere, 



38 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

and if others have, or have had, opinions like these, 
I am not aware of it at this time of writing; nor 
have I borrowed anything from them, unless it be by 
impression from spirits, to which I am aware of some 
susceptibility at times. But these views have long 
been entertained in parts or as a whole, and satisfy 
my mind on some questions that before were trouble- 
some to me. 



CHAPTER III. 

The Divine essence manifests its superior power 
and sphere in all its earthly evolutions and revolu- 
tions. It is the aspiration of nature in our world, 
and in the rocks or mineral kingdom exhibits 
motion as its effect and evidence of its presence; 
but cohesion and gravitation are its highest proper- 
ties in such forms and garments, putting particles 
together, and into compact forms. When the loosened 
mold of earth enables another material element (life) 
to enter into the forms, and constitute a part of the 
structure, or clothing, of the essence or Divine motive- 
power of germination and growth, then and there the 
essence exhibits its aspiration, and puts out feelers for 
a higher sphere, evidently trying, unconsciously, to 
carry the forms of plant and tree away from the rock 
and soil, for it counteracts gravitation, and draws, or 
rolls, the particles up from the earth, and stretches 
them out in strange and fantastic forms, exhibiting 
wild freaks, and making havoc with the law of grav- 
ity on which the student is made to place much 
reliance in his early studies. But the effort of 
essence in the vegetable kingdom to get away from 
the earth in living forms is evidently a failure, as it 
can only point out, but must retain its rooted anchor- 
age in the earth, or, losing it, life departs from the 

(39) 



40 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

form, and the balance of materials falls back, subject 
to the same law as the rocks and soil. 

The next kingdom makes one step more toward 
the spiritual life to which the essence is ever point- 
ing, as the finite force of man points to the Infinite 
God, and to which it is ever drawing its forms by 
unconscious actions on individual organizations, 
which, in the forms, show signs of progression. The 
animal, taking in another ingredient, or more than 
one, additional to those of plants (sensation), is able 
to cut loose from anchorage, and sometimes from solid 
earth, and roam on the surface, in the liquids, and 
above in the fluid air, still holding fast individuality 
and life, which the tree loses if taken from the soil. 
This is one more step, but still something is yet 
wanting to get a form away from the earth, and retain 
a substantial structure in which the Divine essence 
can exhibit more powers, and greater joy and hap- 
piness, than is commensurate with our earthly ex- 
istence. It may fail to do this in the animals and 
also in the plants. At least one more ingredi- 
ent is necessary in the form to secure the growth 
of a body that can cut loose entirely from the soil 
and earthy matter, and soar away independent of 
earth, water, and air, and still retain the forms and 
identity. This step is reached in man, adding, at 
least, one more ingredient to the structure, spiritual- 
ity, though very weak in some forms, yet evidently 
to be found in some degree of power in all human 
forms. When this human form, structure, and com- 
position is reached, this essence is able to ultimate 
and eliminate a spiritual body, and go off with it 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 41 

from the earth, and dwell in it in a more ethereal 
realm where greater powers are unfolded and enjoyed 
than can be on, or in, the earthy matter, like the 
little insect, which casts its skin off in the water, 
opens its new wings, and rises into air, to fly and 
sing, and sometimes sting us, as an exhibition of its 
higher and superior powers to those it had in the 
water. Is this an evidence that these spiritual forms 
are to exist eternally, and pass from realm to realm 
when our earth has finished its course, and having 
wrought out its mission as a globe, is dissolved and 
recombined with other matter? To me it is not; and 
it would take more than priests' word or pretended 
gods' word to satisfy me of such a change and rever- 
sion of the great law of nature, by which all forms 
are combined and dissolved, — at least all whose exist- 
ence is within the reach of our experiments. I can per- 
ceive the permanency of essence in all forms, and the 
escape of germs intact, perfect, and complete, as each 
and every grade of form drops off and leaves the soul 
germ to start again, and again repeat its outer exist- 
ence in a new form of the same type as the last. If 
each distinct kingdom of being repeats only in its 
own grade of forms and existences, then surely man 
did not spring from the animal; and as the animal 
did not, and does not, spring from the vegetable, 
nor the vegetable from the mineral, yet each is a 
base for the other in part, I see no more reason 
for supposing man sprung from the animal. I do 
not think it would be more a disgrace to have our 
origin in a monkey or a saurian than in a lump of 
mud or heap of dirt, as the Bible teaches ; but I look 



42 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

for the authority in nature and correspondence. The 
vegetable and animal kingdoms start at about the 
same era in the geologic period of history. The ani- 
mal does not wait for the development of the vege- 
table, and rise from its apex; why, then, should man 
wait for, and rise from, the apex of the animal? In 
truth, he does not, although he is evidently of much 
later origin here, and waited long for conditions to 
fit the earth for his reception, and when he came it 
was in rude specimens of form, — very coarse in text- 
ure, uncouth in appearance, and various in com- 
plexion ; several species yet extant show the variety 
of origin, and different dates of inception of race. I 
have not found evidence that one kingdom arises out 
of the other in any of those belonging to our earth. 

Next arises the question of distinction between the 
animal and human. If the human is not a distinct 
kingdom, my hopes, theory, and all the glowing 
expectations of the future may fail, for we may fol- 
low our ancestors, and return to the mold in which 
we were originally cast. It certainly is the order of 
nature to "fire and fall back." All nature, as all 
planets, moves in orbits, and returns to each point. 
There are no straight lines in astronomy; all are 
circles and parts of circles, curves and arcs. Eternity 
was represented by the ancients as a hoop, or snake, 
with its tail in its mouth, swallowing itself, and con- 
stantly running out and through itself, and hence 
always complete. Such is man, and beast, and plant. 
L>y man I mean man in his true life and sphere, the 
spiritual. If man was only an overgrown (mentally) 
animal, he might revolve in this life and sphere as 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 43 

the horse and dog may; but since we are sure he 
is a spiritual being, and has a life after and out of 
this and his earth body, we are also sure he consti- 
tutes a distinct kingdom of creation, and has his axis 
and polarity in the spiritual life as the beast has in this, 
where he lives and dies, turns and returns, and, appar- 
ently, fills the measure of his capacity. It required 
the scientific facts of Spiritualism to establish beyond 
a doubt the real and true sphere of the human race. 
Theology, which presented only a multitude of ficti- 
tious heavens, hells, purgatories, sleeps, dreams, resur- 
rections, somewhere and nowhere for a future life, 
could give us no base for supplies of evidence for 
supporting our claims to a separate kingdom for our 
race. Its dreamy fables, and six hundred doctrines, 
had all they could attend to in keeping down reason, 
bewildering intellect, competing with each other, 
and playing upon the passions of the ignorant and 
stupid. The highest honor a man could have, in the 
midst of these sects, before the facts of Spiritualism, 
was to be an infidel, as that denoted one whose 
intellect was superior to his passions and prejudices, 
one who would not be swayed by interest against 
reason. Most of this class of persons, who have 
had a chance to examine the facts of Spiritualism, 
have become convinced of its truth, and will also 
look over the grounds herein presented, and, if well 
established, can also accept them ; but I have no 
expectation or hope of reaching minds who cannot, 
or will not, reason; nor those whose feelings and 
prejudices are too strong for the judgment to be made 
up against them. I can only set forth my views and 



44 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

conclusions, and leave the rest to time. To me there 
seems to be evidence to establish the conclusions 
herein set forth, that the sphere of essence is perfect, 
infinite, unchangeable in its particled germs of being; 
active, positive, masculine, and paternal to all forms 
of being ; while substance, or matter, is equally eter- 
nal and unchangeable in quantity or quality ; but 
negative, feminine, and maternal, forming the womb 
and furnishing the forms of every organic being, and 
the material and aliment for every changing form of 
existence ; the essence running through every change 
of form unchanged, and every form always and for- 
ever changing, the essence taking on and casting off 
particles of matter constantly, the same in the spirit 
world as in this. 

To me each globe or world seems to have a cycle 
in time, and many circles, or strata, of existences 
on, or in, the time of its cycle, revolving each king- 
dom in itself the soul germs not confined in duration 
to the globe, but each during a period sufficient to 
fill out its time and development of form in its 
respective kingdom, dressing itself up in material 
clothing temporarily, and often repeatedly, — each 
holding only by memory what it has imprinted on 
its form. Animals at each transition, losing the en- 
tire form, may have in each life no recollection of the 
past, and human beings may lose all memory of 
a past life when the form is entirely lost that carried 
the pictures collected in and on it. We know our 
earthy bodies fall back to earth, with all the ponder- 
able matter pertaining to them ; every particle of the 
solids and liquids, if not fluids, that composed them. 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 45 

We also know that the imponderable spirit form of 
elemental or attenuated matter continues its exist- 
ence as an organic being, independent of the earthy 
shell, and that the material of which it is composed 
is also subject to the law of aggregation and segrega- 
tion, and it seems to be only a little finer material 
than that which our senses and instruments take 
cognizance of. 

Existence without memory of the past is quite 
unsatisfactory to many persons, and yet we have it. 
"We brought no record from God, or any previous 
life, to this, and it seems as precious as if it were 
loaded with a bundle of former experiences mixed 
and entangled with joys and sorrows such as we 
accumulate here. Should we go to another planet, 
and develop forms and lives there, of what use would 
such a bundle of memories as this earth life furnishes 
be to us ? And if we have more pleasant, and larger 
and longer experiences in our spirit homes, we would 
hardly wish it hanging in a picture before us as we 
have it in a life like this. I do not know but we 
may be able in our ripened spiritual life to recall 
and remember the past life, or a part of it, — at 
least sufficient to satisfy us that we are immortal. 
Possibly this gestation stage of being is not the one 
sufficiently unfolded to enable our powers to extend 
backward, and clasp in conscious memory the exist- 
ence which we possess and inherit from our divine 
nature, and the capacity of our soul essence, and yet 
it may be wilhin the reach of us in a more advanced 
stage of being. In this life we possess many powers 
that are utterly unknown to the unborn child, and 



46 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

why may there not be some correspondence to this 
in the next birth, — the birth of the spirit into its 
full life ? The sphere of spirits that communicate 
with us from the other life is mostly that of our 
friends, who have but recently entered upon that 
life, and of course know but little about it, and even 
when some ancient or far-advanced philosopher has 
given us his name and date, we have generally found 
he has either been only represented by one near us 
in capacity and condition, or has so far left his 
advanced condition as to adapt his words and senti- 
ments and truths to us as a nurse does to a child, or 
a teacher to his pupil; and hence we do not get the 
wisdom of the advanced spheres, even if their inhab- 
itants approach us in the special intercourse of the 
present time. We do not think of presenting philos- 
ophy to infants, even if they are precocious. It is 
not warrantable to crowd even the advanced and 
premature children in our life, nor is it profitable to 
us to be instructed in the wisdom of a higher life 
when that wisdom is not in any way useful or profit- 
able in this life, or as a fitting education or discipline 
for the next. I cannot see any possible use (if use 
is a law of nature) for us to retain in this brief and 
troublesome stage of being the pleasant and varied 
memories of a previous life. To me it seems better 
to count this, the opening of a new progressive life, 
so far as our feelings can reach and take cognizance 
of existence; but if the intellect and reason can 
reach the past and happy ages we have been through, 
and couple them with the future by this short coup- 
ling-link of earth life, it would be no injury, as the 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 47 

feelings would not thereby be so enlisted as to 
make us unreconciled to this. The germinal state of 
any life has little of the real life or real powers that 
pertain to that life in its unfolded condition. We 
may come into possession of powers and capacities 
(and I believe we shall) that, in this life, are not 
dreamed of, or even heard of, and that may not be 
known even to our spirit friends who now commu- 
nicate to us from the border of the great celestial 
sphere. 



CHAPTER IV. 

GOD — FATALITY — IS WHATEVER IS BIGHT? 

Of God I need not say much in addition to what 
I have set forth in the foregoing chapter ; yet some 
readers may infer from my statements that, if each 
soul germ works unconsciously, such is the case with 
the Infinite, or Divine Mind, and that organization 
alone brings consciousness. Essence in the aggre- 
gate is God and Law. It is forever clothed upon 
and embodied in the material universe, and hence is 
never without that opposite and combined relation 
which forever gives it consciousness, intelligence, 
design, and will, or voluntary action, such as we have 
in a finite and feeble degree when in full and perfect 
health of body and mind. No incidents of nature 
are especially ordered, nor are, or can be, any laws 
or orders of nature changed ; yet God forever acts 
" both to will and to do of His own good pleasure." 
Unchangeable both in power and being, and un- 
changeable because perfect, and perfect because 
unchangeable. Center is at every point alike of 
infinite extent, and circumference is nowhere and 
never, either in time or space. God-essence works 
from an infinite number and variety of centers, each 
in itself unconsciously, as the action of each organ in 
the human brain, yet acts in the whole with a perfect 

(48) 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 49 

consciousness. Every finite power of the perfect 
human organism is infinite in God. Only the perfect 
man is a miniature God in germ of intelligence, 
and that not in this life, but the spiritual, and not in 
earthy and gestation form, but in the spiritual state 
or higher life. There is no discord, no inharmony, 
no opposition, no evil or enemy to God in the whole 
vast universe, nor can there be, as it would be a sore 
on the Divine form, like a cancer on the human body. 
The " soul of things " feels none of our wranglings, 
wars, or discords of human action. Nor does God 
feel the jar that rends the earth's crust in the partial 
or general irruptions of earthquakes, volcanoes, or 
geologic upheavals. No jar of tumbling mountains 
or struggling nations disturbs the harmony or order 
of God, or His perfect and harmonious laws. The 
maddened fury of rivers or man is the same to this 
Infinite Essence. A crash of worlds would no more 
disturb the harmony of the Infinite than a crash of 
insects disturbs the revolutions of our planet. Even 
Milton's fabled war in Heaven was never heard of 
by the God in the universe, nor was the crumbling of 
stones and darkening of the sun at the crucifixion of 
Jesus ; and even had they taken place, they would 
have been as harmless and insignificant as the stir of 
an insect among the planets. All these old fabled 
stories serve to mark "the twilight of the soul." 
They are the toys of a religious childhood, the baby- 
rays of our infancy. Men and women even in this 
earth life as effectually outgrow such stories as fill the 
Holy Bibles of all the early nations as they outgrow 
tops and kites, whistles and marbles. 



50 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

God! What is God? Everybody who can talk 

talks about (rod ; and everybody has some idea of 
God; but we cannot expect "grapes from thorns, nor 
figs from thistles," nor can we put a quart of water 
in a gill cup. Capacity determines the qualities of 
such ideas as are common to all human minds. God 
is God to every mind, and that is about all we can 
say for each one's idea of his or her God. It is well 
it is so, for an idea of God is one of the distinguishing 
features of our common humanity, and, of course, the 
idea must be in variety to accommodate itself to the 
great variety of capacities in the multitude of human 
minds. How could an Esquimaux receive the Uni- 
tarian idea of God, or a Samoyde the Calvinist's 
creed ? How would Parker or Emerson be appreci- 
ated in the interior of Africa ? or Beechcr among the 
Arabs? Let each have a God after his own capa- 
city. A toy God for childhood, an imaginary God 
for the unfolding of the youthful mind, and Law, or 
Essence, for the ripened age of intellect, which is 
now breaking upon us in the philosophy of Spiritual- 
ism. Jehovah for the Jews, and Christ for the Chris- 
tians, Brahma for the Hindoos, and Manitou for the 
Indians ; a Serpent for the Egyptians, and Jupiter 
for the Greeks, — and a hundred others, ranging from 
a Lamb to the great Grand Man of the Swedenbor- 
gians. With the change of two words in Pope's 
sentence, the ideas to me seem a fair description: 
"All are but parts of one stupendous whole, whose 
Body" Substance is, and Essence the Soul; the 
never-changing, never-varying "soul of things," or 
essence of all forms. 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 51 

Fatality ! Are we, or are we not, fixed in fate, and 
bound fast by decrees antecedent to our earthly exist- 
ence, which reach to, and control, our every act and 
thought? I will not seize the arguments nor the 
evidence of the Calvinist to prove that we are ; for, 
so far as that is Bible evidence, it is not to me author- 
ity, and proves nothing. The evidence drawn in to 
support fatality and total depravity, from the history 
and experience of man, is like the evidence of the 
senses brought in to support the Bible story of our 
earth being flat. Fatality and depravity are coupled 
together in the Calvinistic creeds ; pre-knowledge be- 
comes decree, and decree becomes fate, and leaves 
no free will, and, of course, destroys responsibility 
and accountability in such beings as much as in 
plants and animals. Such a doctrine could never 
have succeeded except in the contrast with the 
broader and more arbitrary one of Catholicism. Creed 
after creed among the warring partizans arises on the 
absurdities of each other, and incorporates almost as 
great, and sometimes greater, in itself. The philoso- 
phy of fate and free will is natural and simple as the 
cause of day and night in the earth's motions, and 
needs none of the God's-word authority or creed 
absurdities to sustain or explain it. Each particle of 
the Divine Essence is governed by immutable laws, 
subject in the whole to absolute and infinite con- 
trol, and works out its destiny, unfolds its form, and 
ultimates in a form by those laws over which, and 
in which, it lives, moves, and has its being, for it has 
no will or choice of existence in the act or result. 
Such is the soul germ of each being and organization, 



52 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

part of, and subject to, the fatality of Divine law, 
government, and control ; hence, always perfect, har- 
monious, pure, active, self-existent, and possessing 
inherent powers of unfoldment, or, rather, embodi- 
ment of forms in matter, for which, and the charac- 
ter of which, it is never accountable, as it always 
uses the best material at hand, or in its reach. So 
each human form is combined and organized, matured, 
and developed: it reaches by degrees to will-power 
and intelligence, and as they act, and only as they 
act, is the individual accountable or responsible for 
the result, and that to itself. Will is never free but 
as it acts in and by intelligence, makes the person 
responsible for results; remove intelligence, as in 
cases of idiocy and insanity, and the responsibility 
ceases. Will is the executive officer of the intelli- 
gence, and not the motive power of a human being. 
Fatality rules in the essence of all beings; in the sub- 
stance and forms are to be found incidents, accidents, 
abortions, and perfections, voluntary and involuntary 
action, accountability and unaccountability, harmony 
and inharmony, right and wrong, good and evil, God 
and Devil, — these all belong to material forms. Will is 
never free, as it is an executive, with a power behind 
it; intelligence is always free, when it is developed 
to voluntary action, or sends the will out to execute 
its decrees, — then, and never before, is accountable, 
and only accountable to itself or other intelligences 
for its dealings with them. There is no accountabil- 
ity of man to God, for there is no voluntary act of 
the essence or soul germ within us. A large and 
worthy class of Christians have centrally summed up 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 53 

from their word of God and their own feelings, based 
on it, these three items : first, man's " deep, innate 
depravity as an individual; second, his subjection to 
the power of depraved social organizations, called the 
world; third, his subjection to the power of unseen, 
malignant spirits, who are controlled by Satan." 
Such, in part or whole, can be little else than absurd 
nonsense to clear, reasoning minds, especially if we 
accept their conclusions that man is to be held 
accountable, and rewarded or punished after all this, 
for his accepting or rejecting truths he cannot com- 
prehend or understand, and take joy or misery as an 
eternal and unchangeable lot. Satan, of course, is a 
fabled personage, and the malignant spirits are mostly 
in earth forms, and ever have been mainly in the 
churches, from and by which they have ever wrung 
the breasts of martyrs for advancing new truths, and 
a majority of the depraved organizations of society 
have ever been religious, of which the Christian has 
had its full share, and the deep, innate depravity 
of man is a fiction which priests have used to get 
control of the ignorant masses. 

Whenever a soul germ has found in its reach mate- 
rials suitable in quantity and quality for a good, 
healthy form, intelligence has been the result, and 
free agency — as it is improperly termed — is the 
consequence, and accountability follows of course; 
and when it has failed to reach, in quantity or qual- 
it} 7 , sufficient material for such, it made an imperfect 
form, and an idiot, or semi-intelligent person came 
forth. Accountability accordingly failed, and so of 
free agency. Nature is always pure and perfect, and 



64 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

never depraved, neither totally or partially. The 
extraordinary and supernatural efforts to restore it 
are, consequently, useless, and all religious changes 
of heart have left the victims with the same nature, 
disposition, and tendencies which in had organiza- 
tions with education and surroundings corresponding, 
are no doubt " prone to evil as the sparks to lly up- 
ward," but not from any inherent quality, as it is 
always the result of these three conditions of the 
person, all of which are external and ephemeral, viz., 
organization, education, and surroundings. Intellect 
has power over some circumstances, and shapes them 
to ends, but is itself dependent on superior powers, 
lodged in fate, or immutable laws, which give or 
withhold it without any voluntary action. These 
laws penetrate through matter as the blood through 
the living body, and execute themselves without the 
least regard to what we call right or wrong. Calvin- 
ism and Calvin teaches that the new-born infant 
is "a seed of sin," and "abominable to God," and 
yet even in this enlightened age Calvinism holds up 
its sectarian head in our own country as high as 
any, and tops out several colleges with its " abomin- 
able " doctrine. I am glad they father it over on 
God in the doctrine of pre-ordination, and thus 
relieve us. This Calvinistic authority, with the 
Synod of Dort at its back, declares that we are all 
"conceived in sin," hence, of course, no regenerated 
persons ever beget or bring forth any children, nor 
can they spring from God, but must all come from 
sinners and the unregenerate. If any are regener- 
ated from sin, they cannot, of course, have sinful 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 55 

acts in conceiving or begetting children ; but as even 
the clerg}~nien's sons are as bad, wild, rude, and 
wicked as any, no wonder these wise teachers make 
for thein no exceptions, but put all into the general 
law of wicked conception. But why do not the 
regenerate stop this greatest of all sins in bringing 
these wicked and depraved beings into existence? 
If their doctrines be true, the greatest sin in our 
world is to start one of these wicked souls for its 
eternal misery. They also go so far as to assert that 
we cannot think a good thought of ourselves, nor do 
any but wicked deeds, except by the grace of God 
acting on or in us. This is fatalism with a ven- 
geance, and a most diabolical one ! In summing up 
the depravity of human nature, and the fatality 
involved in it, the Christian represents the effects 
of our nature as "a glowing furnace constantly 
emitting flames and sparks, a fountain sending out 
polluted streams, a seed-plant of sin," etc.; "a stain 
or infection pervading all the powers of the soul." 

The most astonishing fact connected with these 
wicked and absurd doctrines which thus implicate 
God, and disgrace man, is that they find intelligent 
beings to believe them, and have them preached; but 
the doctrine itself furnishes the teachers from those 
who accept and apply it, and try to prove it true in 
themselves, and do carry it forward often in their 
children by stamping it on them at conception and 
in gestation. This species of Christian fatalism is in 
itself sufficiently terrible to frighten all timid minds 
back from examining the facts of a real fatalism 
which exists in the essence of all things, and its 



56 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

purity and destiny. In the outer forms of organic 
Life fatality is not the law universally, for where 
intellect is developed, it, being a centerstanoc, to an 
extent controls circumstances and changes relations 
by its action. Of course, interior to it, and remote 
from our senses, is the essence working outward, and 
subject to the immutable laws of destiny, and though 
you may put your house up two stories or three 
stories higher, it is so accordingly ; yet, before it was 
built, fate decided it should disappear entirely, and 
leave no story. Yet the hight was determined and 
decided by intellect at the time. But some fatalists 
ask if the intellect could decide any otherwise than 
as it does. It seems so ; yet it does not, and that is 
the only argument to prove that it cannot do differ- 
ent from what it does. 

The Calvinist text is that we cannot think a good 
thought, or do a good act, or have a good motive, 
except by the grace and especial act of God ; being 
bound fast in a fatal necessity to evil by our de- 
praved nature, which ive cannot change. This phi- 
losophy teaches that the essence of every human 
being, of and in God forever, and always like its 
parent, and bound in a fatal necessity to work out 
harmony and ultimate happiness in every circle and 
cycle of being through which it revolves, and find 
for its body a complete ripening and development 
before it casts it off, and always, and in every form, 
receive full pay and reward for all its sufferings, 
whatever they may be, in some stages of its growth; 
that an earthly abortion is no abortion of the soul, 
and a broken and miserable life here has its end 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 57 

secure in fate for joy in the spiritual world; that 
fatalism is on the side of purity, and not depravity, 
and is of the essence of being, and not the form ; is 
the divine motive of man's existence, and not man's 
intellectual motive of action, — the former being 
always right, and the latter sometimes wrong. I 
have to alter another sentence of Pope to express his 
sentiment and mine, with my use of terms, viz., 
" Binding nature fast in fate, left free " human intel- 
ligence. It is not the will that is left in freedom, for 
the will is blind, and only goes as it is sent to strike 
the blow; but it is intellect sitting in judgment, and it 
alone is accountable. Insane persons have will, and 
many act in, and by, will whom we never hold 
accountable to the law, but whoso acteth in the 
judgment of intellect is held accountable for his 
action, "with malice aforethought," — a prepense is 
the legal term. In our jurisprudence, which is far in 
advance of our religion, we never hold the will to 
account, but we do the intellect, and when the court 
can be satisfied that an intellectual decision did not 
precede the will, and act of the will, it releases the 
culprit from the penalty of the law. It is not always 
easy for superficial minds to distinguish between the 
will and the intelligence, but there is as much differ- 
ence as between the judge and the sheriff. Fatality 
in no wise conflicts with the action or decisions of 
the judgment, for it is anterior to and remote from 
it, and carries it round in its orbit as the earth 
carries the moon, while it leaves it to revolve in its 
own orbit, and on its own axis. The Divine Mind 
holds the whole as the sun holds the solar system, 



58 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

and, while it governs all, leaves each planet free in 
its motions and short journeys. So man is as much 
subject to the Divine government as planets to the 
sun, and as free. Each human soul has its own body, 
motions, and atmospheric belts, and passes through 
its changes for itself. We cannot escape conse- 
quences nor accountability by this theory, as we are 
taught that we may by Christian creeds. 

The Calvinist, while actually throwing all respon- 
sibility for depravity and sin on God, still, with a 
reckless Christian inconsistency, shifts the horrible 
consequences over upon man, and tortures him eter- 
nally for God's own work in giving him the depraved 
nature in the fatal decree. But God had "power over 
the clay," and made the vessel to dishonor, and we 
have nothing to do but bear it, or await His grace to 
save a few, of which we stand poor chance to be a 
part, — or, at least, I do, for I certainly would not 
choose to be saved by such a God, in such a way, and 
with such company, and am thankful the doctrine is 
not true, but, instead, that Servetus was Calvin's 
judge in the spirit world, and not the partial God. 
If Servetus could forgive him, God would not arrest 
or reverse the decision, as He had no interest in the 
affair between them. As the martyr's stake was the 
only effective argument Calvin could find here against 
Servetus's stronger reason and rationalism, it was 
powerless and out of his reach when both were in 
the spirit world, and such is true of the persecutors 
and persecuted of our time and country. 

A friend asks me why I use the masculine pro- 
noun for God, when I use one at all, and I reply : 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 59 

£rst, because it is a custom that I have no good rea- 
son for changing; second, if we use the terms posi- 
tive and negative, it is customary to apply the mas- 
culine to the positive; and as I have no good reason, 
except custom, and no good reason for changing it, I 
rest it here, while I acknowledge no superiority in 
masculine over feminine in our or any race or world. 
It is a defect in our language that we have no suit- 
able term without gender to apply to God, and hence 
the very word itself implies the masculine, and, of 
course, is pronounced in that gender, if at all, and 
most especially in a country where so many believe 
God was personified and incarnated in a man whom 
they call the Christ, the Lamb, the Messiah, etc., — 
all of which are in the masculine, the Lamb being 
from the Aries of the Zodiac, and never applied to 
Mary the Mother, which was from Virgo, also of 
mythological and astronomical history. I do not 
think the worshipers of Christ, as God, need com- 
plain, since it is admitted his mother was a woman, 
and, of course, he was an obedient and dutiful child ; 
and some of them say his wife, or bride, is the church, 
of which we have rather a poor opinion from the 
specimens we meet with generally, and, from the num- 
ber of churches coming from him, I suppose he must 
be a polygamist. I think we had better let it go in 
the masculine at present, except where we can use 
the plural, and put in Father and Mother, Brother 
and Sister, Husband and Wife, and I certainly have 
no objection to such terms for God. 

To return to, and once more state, the doctrine of 
fatality. Fatality, preordination, and decree are a 



GO ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

pari of, and absolute in, God, who is Law, Essence, 
Motive Power, and purpose] and contains all past 
and future events at the same time, as time has no 
record on the unchangeable, but only on us and 
changeable objects of substance, which have forms 
and measure in space, as well as time. But fatality 
and perfection are both lacking in the changing 
forms of our own and other lives on earth, and yet it is 
often said a person who is born to be hanged cannot 
be drowned, for if drowned, of course, he or she was 
born to be drowned ; but the decisions of the court 
may determine the mode of death for a culprit, and 
after we know, we declare that was the fate, and it 
could not be changed, but we never set up this fatal- 
ism till the act is secured lest it be changed. Even 
this free action of intellect is exceedingly limited, for 
we often determine and resolve to get rich, or fat, or 
well, and fail, because we cannot control enough of 
circumstances to accomplish it. Wicked acts, and 
oppressive tyrannies, and corrupt institutions, are the 
effect of man's free agency, and proof enough that 
he has power in his intellect to resist at least the 
laws of nature to his own injury, or even physical 
destruction ; but this free agency never reaches in 
motive or effect the essence of his being, and never 
corrupts or impairs the soul germ, or interior spirit, 
which is the divine part of man, and lives in its own 
fatality beyond the reach of free agency, and, conse- 
quently, beyond the reach of injury from a false or 
corrupt decision, or action, or motive. Free agency, 
or semi-voluntary action, is the law of finite intelli- 
gences, hence the blunders and entanglements of 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 61 

social, political, moral, religious, and sexual life. 
Responsibility and accountability hanging partially 
to it makes the effects fall .on us with double force, 
and we become doubly entangled by our efforts to 
set up legal, moral, and religious standards, and force 
all to observe and feel their value and importance, 
when many are so organized that the standard is 
entirely out of their reach, they being either too 
short or too long for the Procrustean bedstead. This 
free will, or free agency, would at first seem to be a 
curse to man, and might be mistaken for the embodi- 
ment of the Satanic rebellion of Milton's fables; but, 
after all, like the knowledge obtained by Adam and 
Eve in eating the fruit, it proves to be at last a bless- 
ing, for we could hardly have conceived a worse con- 
dition than the race would have been in (if there had 
been any race) if Adam had not partaken of the tree 
that opened his eyes to good and evil. This old 
fable, no doubt, personifies and implies free agency, 
or a voluntary action of the finite intelligence, with- 
out which there would have been no volition in the 
human world more than among trees or animals, and, 
of course, no accountability or moral responsibility. 
I think we would prefer to keep the knowledge 
obtained by the fabled fall, even though it some- 
times makes us ashamed. Sin, shame, knowledge, 
free agency, responsibility, and accountability seem 
to be near akin, and to come into the catalogue of 
human events and experiences at about the same 
period in Jewish history, which is not, however, reli- 
able for any historic statement about the race or its 
creation. Certainly, if man is not a free agent, he 



62 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

cannot he a sinner, as the sinfulness of an act implies 
a reflective and voluntary action, with knowledge 
that it is wrong. That there is some degree of sin- 
fulness, and some degree of accountability, and a full 
degree of responsibility in man in our state of society, 
and in Christian countries, I think all must admit, 
and this in itself admits so much of free agency, and 
relaxes so much of fatality as to comprise these, all 
of which are confined to the outward organic form 
of earthly or spiritual body. Summing up the sub- 
ject, it may be stated as follows : Fatality is in the 
Infinite, free agency in the finite. The Infinite com- 
prehends and controls the finite as a whole, and as 
the ocean does its drops of water, while individual 
intelligences revolve by their own central power and 
act voluntarily to the extent of their own capacity, 
which is exceedingly limited; man alone of earthly 
beings, coming within the scope of intelligent organ- 
ization and free agency or accountability. It is said 
by some that an agent is not free. To an extent 
this is true, and yet he could not be an agent with- 
out some degree of freedom, — freedom at least to 
obey or disobey orders and instructions which most 
agents certainly have the power to do, at least intel- 
ligent ones have. Agency is consistent only with a 
certain degree of freedom, and not without it ; such 
is man's free agency. It is limited in the outlines, 
and not in the filling up, in the warp and not in the 
woof. God stretches the warp and man puts in the 
woof. Essence is the warp of life, substance the 
woof, and the free agency is in striping the web in 
filling it up. Existence is folded in the endless warp 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 63 

around the beam of particled Deity, and the lines 
cannot be broken as the shuttle of will is sent in its 
filling-mission ; it stripes with white and black, good 
and ill, love and hate, joy and grief; and when 
directed by intelligence, consistently and in accord- 
ance with nature's laws, makes a harmonious and 
beautiful life-web of this stage of being. Take an- 
other illustration : a boy is sent to school by his par- 
ents ; he keeps on his way till out of sight ; then, 
finding he is a free agent, he goes to the grocery instead 
of the school-house ; there men feed him with liquor ; 
he starts back, falls in the mud, reaches home, and gets 
a whipping or a fever. Was he, or was he not, free to 
act independent of the parents, or what power con- 
trolled him ? Was it not his imperfect intellect that 
made the blunder? Was it free agency to whip him, 
and to give him liquor ? I would hold the lines of 
accountability tightly over all, and make the account- 
ability not to a Christian a Christian law, a Chris- 
tian creed, or a Christian God, but to the law of 
Nature, obedience to which would bring harmony, 
peace, and love among the race. No arbitrary 
standard set up by a person, a society, or a nation 
can be the standard of moral or religious account- 
ability. If each individual sets up his own for him- 
self alone the variety would not be as intolerable 
as the forced regulations of sectarian bigotry, but 
even this would not answer with our inherited 
depravity and perverted educations. As we discuss 
Nature's laws, and set them up for the standard of 
moral law and religious action, we get the truest 
standard of harmony. 



G4 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

I ought, perhaps, to ask pardon for using the old 
Jewish fables to explain principles, but, like modern 
novels, and in almost the same ratio, they are 
tw founded on facts." When Adam was only a machine, 
and exercised no judgment, and did no voluntary act 
but as he was bid, he had no sin, and showed no free 
agency; but the first act arising from freedom and 
his judgment was the sinful one by the story, and 
yet to the race the greatest blessing that had or could 
come to it, and especially if it, and it alone, " brought 
death into the world," for of all curses none, it seems 
to me, would be greater than to live on this little 
globe forever, and be simple machines obeying orders. 
Total depravity and total free agency are absurd 
assumptions that cannot be sustained in the justice 
of God or the experience of man ; but the partial 
depravity and partial free agency of man is apparent 
to all, and consistent both with the justice of God 
and experience of man. The almost universally- 
received doctrine (among Christians) of total deprav- 
ity has led its ablest defenders into labyrinths of 
absurdity from which Edward Beecher tries in vain 
to extricate them in his Conflict of Ages, and a few 
bolstering sermons. Such is equally true of the advo- 
cates of absolute free agency, or absolute fatality; 
neither is correct as absolute. We are finite and 
limited ; depravity is limited ; free agency is limited ; 
fatalism is limited; and man is limited in all his 
powers, except only that the soul germ, or divine 
essence, is eternal in duration and with eternal inher- 
ent powers of organizing forms. 

The depravity which modern Christian writers 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 65 

attribute to nature, I attribute to our sectarian Chris- 
tianity. Nation warring upon nation, sect upon 
sect, individual upon individual, and the whole upon 
nature, with the abominable and inconsistent and 
cruel doctrine of total depravity and infant damna- 
tion, which is a consistent part of it, has produced 
more than any other cause the wicked and corrupt 
state of society which we have around us. 

Among the blundering absurdities of our common 
Christian teachers is the doctrine that we all enter 
this state of existence fresh from the hand of God 
(at least if born in wedlock), on an even plane of 
total depravity, accountability, and moral responsi- 
bility, and hence are all alike to be charged and 
credited with what we are in life, when the fact is 
that none are born moral, virtuous, religious or even 
Christian, some vile, wicked, thieves, drunkards, lib- 
ertines, and some with a more religious germ, and 
that not Christian, nor capable of being developed 
into it, or any idolatrous devotion ; and all these are 
inherited from parents, and forced upon us by cir- 
cumstances over which we had no control, as they 
preceded birth and voluntary action, and whether 
called good or bad, were derived especially from the 
parents, and the circumstances that surrounded the 
mother during gestation. But a glaring absurdity, 
that any simpleton can see, is the statement that 
we are all the children of God, who is perfect, and 
we totally depraved, and yet free agents ; and it is 
equally absurd to fix any standard as the one govern- 
ing all human actions, for we are organized in such 
variety that some persons are in their nature and vol- 



G6 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

untary action as harmless as doves and pure as 
angels, while others are incarnate demons from their 
earliest voluntary action ; and neither is really nor 
especially in the least attributable to nature, but to 
the parents and circumstances that controlled the 
mother from conception to birth, and the surround- 
ings afterward. Nature covers the whole ground of 
variety, as she does the great variety of plants and 
animals, and would have variety in harmony, order, 
and beauty. 

Edward Beecher says the doctrine of endless future 
punishment will never be entirely abandoned. What 
a short-sighted mortal not to see that it is already 
abandoned by nearly all educated and intelligent per- 
sons ; and must, in a few centuries, by all human 
beings on our planet and in the spheres, be abandoned 
as a relic of barbarism applied to God in the ignor- 
ance of man. That doctrine, and all others, which 
have no other or better foundation or authority than 
the Bible, will melt away before science as the frost 
before a bright sun in the spring-time. Nothing 
which reason does not authorize and establish on her 
authority, can withstand the advance of science, and 
the two alone and together must, and will, make up 
the philosophy for the future in every department of 
intellectual action. In such an arrangement the 
sifting of our theology will throw out nearly all the 
articles of belief and faith in popular Christian^. 
We may certainly look for an age of reason, and a rea- 
sonable and consistent explanation of the phenomena 
of life, death, and immortality, before many years 
to prevail. 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 67 

Intellect is a condition of physical development in 
finite beings; so is responsibility and accountability; 
and so is free agency, conscientiousness, and consci- 
ousness both of being and accountability in the 
moral nature of man ; and as we are not born with 
any of these qualities, of course, it would be unjust 
in any power setting us into life here to hold us 
accountable, or condemn us, for sins of others or our- 
selves, even if we did, or could, commit them. We 
are certainly entitled to a fair start in this life, and 
if fate had doomed us to endless misery before we 
were born, or entangled us in depravity from which 
only a miracle could save us, it would be useless to 
call God just, or good, or wise, to reasoning beings. 
To me it seems consistent and reasonable that every 
human being is born with an ultimate destiny, and 
can feel security for absolute happiness, and a full 
measure of joy, harmony and love in some stage of 
each existence. Immutable laws work out their ends 
in all existence, but free agency in intelligences is 
one of the laws that works with the rest from its 
introduction in our organic forms. Intelligence plans 
and executes, succeeds or fails, in conformity with 
its ability to control and place things and circum- 
stances by its agent the will. If we admit, that God 
said to man "Thou shalt not kill" as an imperative 
command, He should have so made him that he could 
not, or would not, kill, then it would have been 
obeyed, and man saved. 

Is whatever is bight? In considering this 
question, much, or all, will depend on the use of terms. 
It is doubtful whether there is any absolute standard 



G8 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

of right and wrong, that is, one which is not changed 
by circumstances, and even reversed by the judgment 
of man. Murder is generally culled wrong, but there 
are circumstances under which it is approved, both in 
wholesale and detail, by the judgment of most men. 
So of all lesser crimes, as they are called. Chris- 
tianity has at some stage, and under some circum- 
stances, sanctioned or sanctified nearly every crime, 
and, I believe, the Jewish God is charged with them 
all in detail in the Bible as ordering most of them to 
be committed by man. If we were to take the judg- 
ment of men and authority of church, we should fail 
as we would in selecting a holy day for a Sabbath, 
where we should find some claiming each till all 
were sacred days. By this rule, all acts of man may 
be right and sanctified in turn, and on each deed of 
life, that, more than any authority of church, would 
be cited as an evidence of depravity, if not total. 
Still, as we use words to name and qualify things, 
acts, and events, and they are all in great variety, so 
must the words be that represent them, and although 
we change the term we apply to all under different 
circumstances, and call the same both right and 
wrong, yet we need both terms. That which is 
wrong today, under certain circumstances, is not 
right at the same time and under the same circum- 
stances. It is not both right and wrong, although by 
some standards may be held to be one, and by other 
standards the other conscientiously held to be. How, 
then, can we say "whatever is is right"? To me it is 
wrong to hang a man by the neck till dead, even by 
order of judge and jury ; to others it is right, although 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 69 

both terms apply to it, and the act is not absolutely 
either of itself; yet it is absurd to say it is right, and 
I must yield my conscience to it; and it is equally 
unjust to force my opponents to consent to my defini- 
tion of the act. We see, then, that there are two terms 
that convey a meaning which places an act directly 
opposite in relation to our consciences, and the same 
act in opposite relations to the same conscience under 
changed circumstances. For instance : a rape, out- 
side of marriage is, by nearly all civilized people and 
Christians, called wrong, and, in the worst sense, is 
so to me ; and yet, in marriage, it is called right by 
a majority of the same people, though to me as heinous 
in as out of marriage, being everywhere a crime and 
sign of depravity, and yet many people really and 
honestly believe it right soon as the parties are mar- 
ried, and even the law takes its shield of defence from 
the victim in such cases. But there are still other 
causes for reverses in the qualifying term to the same 
act. We all say it is wrong to steal the property of 
another and convert it to our use ; but most of us 
will say it is right for a man to steal food to save his 
wife and children from starving, if he can get it thus, 
and cannot get it otherwise. Using, then, these dis- 
tinguishing terms to express the quality of an action 
as it appears to us respectively under the circum- 
stances, by and in which it was at the time produced, 
we certainly have need of both, and could not con- 
sistently use one of them for all phases under which 
the act could appear. • I am, therefore, compelled to 
answer the question that, according to our use of 
terms, and in the sphere of intelligent action, and 



TO ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

what there is of free agency, all acts are not to me 
right. Whatever is is, but is not always right, and 
the same act is not always right or wrong even to the 
same person. But while we view this in the sphere 
of Unite and intelligent beings, we can also take a 
larger view of the universe, and go outside of these 
and all qualifying adjectives that are necessary to 
define the relative corresponding quality of acts to us 
either moralty or physically. To us, darkness is as 
real as light, and cold as real as heat, but we can 
realize that these are only negative and relative quali- 
ties to us at times and in places. To the Infinite, 
and even to us in a new position or condition, they 
disappear, and are not either real or apparent. Such 
is equally true morall} 7 as well as physically both of 
condition and our vision and relation to the acts and 
our present condition. What is wrong now, morally, 
may, at a future time, be right, or lose all its quali- 
ties of right or wrong entirely. No acts under all 
changes in us, and all relations of us to them, can be 
either wholly right or wrong forever. Nor is it prob- 
able that any one act will remain on the face of time 
more permanently than a dark day, or cold night, or 
cloudy sky. Even now acts that stand back in his- 
tory are often changed from bad to good, or from 
right to wrong, according as we view them from new 
standpoints, and under changed circumstances. We 
cannot admit that God the Infinite can realize the 
existence of what is dark to us, or of what is cold to 
us, nor can we conceive any corresponding conditions 
to the perfection of the Divine Mind. Why should 
the moral darkness or religious coldness have a more 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 71 

permanent, or extended, or durable existence ? Right 
and wrong, or cold and heat, are neither convertible 
terms, nor at all appropriate to infinite powers. They 
have no meaning or existence beyond the finite use 
made of them by finite beings, and even in that use 
are mainly applicable to their rudi mental state of 
being. Moral standards of right and wrong appro- 
priately exist within the sphere of finite accountabil- 
it}~ and partial free agency, but do not extend beyond 
it or to the realm of essences. To the Infinite there 
is no right or wrong; such terms have no meaning; 
but the fact only exists in whatever is is, and with- 
out quality to infinity. There can be no evil, or 
opposite, positive or relative, to infinite perfection, 
else it were not perfect : for to be perfect and infinite 
implies no opposition and no deteriorating, or oppos- 
ing force or power, and hence man cannot sin against 
God. 

The absurd idea of a Devil originated in the sphere 
where darkness and cold had demonstrative existence, 
and could be personified and represented. Finite 
beings see and feel evil and wrong, moral and phys- 
ical. They realize darkness and coldness (absence of 
light and heat), are partially free agents, and account- 
able, while God — Essence and the inner soul germ 
of being — has no realization of such conditions, for 
to it they are not. Fatalism, perfection, and eternal 
action are its attributes forever. Discords, variety, 
change, good and evil (which are only relative to 
each other) exist in the outer sphere of substance 
and forms, but never in the inner, or essence. The 
terrible conflict between eminent Christians, which 



72 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

lias been going on since the Reformation, and has 
crazed or bewildered so many able minds, lias almost 
invariably arisen from admitting false premises to 
start with, and acknowledging the fatal, foolish error 
of the positive nature of evil and its opposing rela- 
tion to God, with the depravity of man appended to 
his existence as innate, and either total or partial. If 
they had started right, the conflict could not have 
occurred, nor the evil to them have resulted. This 
has arisen in most cases from taking the Bible for a 
guide, or a standard of truth, when it was as fallible 
in morals, in ethics, in metaphysical truths as in geol- 
ogy and chronology, and entirely unreliable in all. 
An abandonment of this basis of falsehood, and an 
escape from these muddy and murky waters of super- 
stition and sectarianism, will give us a clear percep- 
tion through the eye of reason of these great truths 
of pre-existence and future life, of the endless rounds 
and cycles of being, and the lethean pools in which 
we wash off all the useless rubbish accumulated in 
each preceding life or world, — or, perhaps, lose it only 
as we pass the deeper stream between the cycles that 
include many worlds and lives. 

Much of our Christian theology has its origin in 
the fables and follies of other books than the Bible, 
and are so woven in with it as to be inextricable by 
any but the best of scholars, and few of such are 
willing to expose what they know to the ignorant 
and prejudiced multitude of worshipers. There is 
little doubt that their idea of the Trinity in the (rod- 
head had its origin in India, as worshiped in the three- 
headed God of the Hindoos, and the origin of Devil, 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 73 

no doubt, was in Persia, and from the Zoroastrian 
theoiy of the Zend Avesta, and good and evil powers 
personified in Ormuzd and Ahriman, and their per- 
petual wars and conflicts of day and night, or light 
and darkness. 

I cannot see how a strict sense of justice can any- 
more exclude the Devil from his place, or from a de- 
sire to rule, than it does his adversary; nor can I see 
how it is right or proper for God and his servants to 
secure and convert the children of the Devil, and 
induce them to desert, than it is for the Devil and 
his servants to do the same thing by catching God's 
servants. According to the Christian theory both 
are pursuing something like the trade of Negro-steal- 
ing in Africa, in which the poor victims are made 
into a sort of chattel-servants, and kept so, unless 
they desert, or become fugitives. There is, indeed, a 
curious use made of the terms right and wrong when 
applied to one or the other of these great imaginary 
personages. We are taught to call every act of God 
right, even though the same in man, or the Devil, is 
the most superlatively wrong of all the acts in the cal- 
endar. The indiscriminate murder of men, women, 
and children, said to be ordered by God, in the Old 
Testament, we are taught to say was right ; but if 
ordered by any other authority it would be heinously 
wrong. Most persons would condemn as wrong, in 
man or Devil, the act which is said to have brought 
Jesus into our world; but, in the Holy Ghost, it was 
right, and would be again, and a thousand times re- 
peated if we needed any more Saviours of men not 
already saved. Perhaps such a personage in our 



74 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

day might escape crucifixion, but lie could not per- 
secution. If, as individuals, we fix in our minds each 
a Standard of right and wrong, I do not know why 
we should not try the acts of God by it, the same as 
those of man, if He actually did, or ordered, acts as 
man does. I could not call an act right in God which 
I would condemn in man as wrong, when the effect 
was the same on the objects. I should call acts of a 
parent wrong such as God is said to have often per- 
formed to the children of men ; and to me it would 
be equally criminal in God, as a parent, if it were 
true as stated in the Bible. Eternal punishment 
could never, by any standard of right which I have, 
be justified, because it can work no benefit to those 
involved in it, nor to those who escape it ; and to me 
it is, therefore, wrong in God to inflict it as it would 
be in man. Neither does Edward Beecher's theory of 
a pre-existence relieve God from the injustice and 
wrong ; for if we come here, and suffer, and suffer on 
eternally, and with totally depraved natures, and yet 
do not know for what or where, when and how, we 
have sinned, so as to deserve "of all evils the essence 
and force," I can see no plea of justification by that 
more than without it ; for, if the victim has no knowl- 
edge of the crime for which he is punished, it is cer- 
tainly unjust and wrong to him, and the only defence 
left is a warning to others for the safety of the inno- 
cent, and as no such result can accrue, there is left 
nothing but wrong, without even palliating justifica- 
tion. 

I can Bee no consistency in the sentence "what- 
ever is is right" when used by, or applied to, us as 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 75 

finite intelligences. Infinite Essence, which is Law, 
may have but one cause of action, one standard of 
judgment, and one motive and object, and that may 
be qualified with one term ; but we subvert, and per- 
vert, and invert, overturn and underturn, and play 
all the varieties we can, and need a variety of words 
to qualify our actions, among which none are more 
appropriate than right and wrong. It seems to me 
that no act can, at all times and under all circum- 
stances, be termed wrong or right, and yet some 
are appropriately termed wrong and some right at 
all times under the variety of circumstances. 

Children, under some circumstances, are born with 
so strong a propensity to steal as to be almost, or 
quite, irresistible. In such, and to such, the act is not 
wrong; no conscience condemns it in them, and to a 
rational mind no criminality can attach to such per- 
son ; indeed, to such person it is right. When two 
entire strangers meet on the battle-field in opposing 
armies, each tries to kill the other, and the success- 
ful one feels that he has done no wrong, and usually 
feels that he has done right, and has an approving 
conscience. Yet if they had met elsewhere, and 
under other circumstances, and he had slain the 
stranger, both his own conscience and the public 
would have condemned it, and called it wrong. Yet 
to the Divine Mind there can be no difference and 
no justification in the military array, or clash of arms. 
Infinite intelligence can have no interest in our wars 
and conflicts, not even in our theological controver- 
sies and sectarian wrangles. Infinity has no stand- 
ard of right and wrong ; but most of the miseries of 



76 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

our world, arising from persecution and vindictive 
punishment, have arisen from persons setting up as 

Divine authority moral and religious standards of 
their own, and fixing arbitrary systems of right and 
wrong, to which they would bring all the various 
consciences of man, lengthening and shortening to 
the measure which is often a cruelty and severity 
that crushes out life. Well-educated divines, of high 
standing in the church, often assert that God has, at 
great self-denial, devised a system merciful to the 
fallen sinners of our race, and that He deeply grieves 
at the sins [wrongs] of mortals. Such a degraded 
idea of God cannot for a moment have a place in my 
mind, as applied to the author and parent of our exist- 
ence and of infinite power and wisdom. Infinity cannot 
grieve, nor can IT make self-sacrifices or sacrifices of 
any kind. The wide space between us, as finite beings, 
and Infinity, must be such us to forever preclude 
any of the qualities which belong to us ever affecting 
Deity. The very term, perfection, passes the object 
possessing it beyond grief and self-sacrifice, and every 
quality that can in the least disturb harmony and joy. 
How such narrow and ridiculous ideas of Deity can 
still be entertained by intelligent minds in our day is 
to me almost unaccountable, except on the basis of 
their own theory of depravity, by which we can sup- 
pose they do not believe them, but teach them to the 
ignorant to retain power and influence, which they 
might lose by elevating the common standard of 
knowledge and reason. Eat not of the tree of knowl- 
edge — use not your carnal reason — has long been 
the command of the Church. 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 77 

Infinite Essence is eternal, and eternally the same, 
filling all time and space, and comprehending all acts 
and events; and all essential existences are forever 
the same in quality, character, and attributes, being 
part of the Divine Mind, with its perfections, etc. 
To God, therefore, there is no wrong, because no 
opposing power, no worrying experiences, no conflict 
within or without the Essence that ever can influ- 
ence or affect it in whole or in parts. In man, the 
interior soul germ, or essence, sits enthroned, calm 
and supreme, over all changes and conflicts of this 
and every outward organic existence, sure of its eter- 
nal inheritance and inherent powers ; forever right, 
because forever in harmony with its parent, God, and 
forever obedient to Divine law. Therefore, in the 
sphere and realm of essence, where all is perfection, 
harmony, law, and order, without change, variation 
"or shadow of turning," there is no wrong, no blame, 
no sin, no depravity. From that realm we drop down 
into the outer world where all is change, conflict, 
variation, right, wrong, either, neither, light, dark- 
ness, cold, heat, both of body and spirit. In all the 
realm of our outer organic forms there are the conflicts 
and contacts of change, aggregation and segregation, 
life, death, and still to us an immortality in the soul 
essence in its individual existence, — an eternal pur- 
pose, which its inherent powers and never-changing 
activity is forever carrying out, and which is to build 
u in matter house for mind " organic in the sphere of 
substance a limited temple in which the various 
powers can be expressed in the union of the mascu- 
line essence with the feminine substance, — the very 



78 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

prefix, 9tt&, expressing its inferiority, — producing that 
never-ending affinity winch we call creation, but which 
is only the union and action of essence and substance. 
Here is the sphere of right and wrong, good and evil; 
here the realm of free agency and accountability, and 
here man makes his creeds, Bets up his dogmatic and 
arbitrary authority of morals, religion, and politics, 
and forces by combinations individuals into subjec- 
tion to power by the force of circumstances wholly 
or partially controlled by the free agency of intellect. 
Motives, often right when acts are wrong, and motives 
often wrong when acts are right, and often both 
wrong or both right when tried by nature, — the only 
standard of infallibility in our sphere of existence. I 
cannot say polygamy was wrong to the wise Solomon, 
or to Brighara Young. I can only say it is wrong 
to me. I cannot say it is wrong in the Shakers to 
entirely separate the sexes. I can only say it is 
wrong to me. I cannot say cannibalism is wrong to 
the Feejee. I can only say it is wrong to me; and so 
is the sexual tyranny and abuse of woman by man in 
the best society of our own or any country. To each 
and all of us there is a standard of right and wrong, 
and we can each see it, but we all look through our 
own organizations and our educated consciences, and 
hence the variety of interpretations of what is right or 
wrong. The cannibal, born and educated in his own 
belief, is no more accountable for eating human flesh 
than the ox for eating grass, or the thief or drunkard 
for the effects of the overmastering appetite or pro- 
pensity with which he was born. The Ethiopian 
cannot change his skin, nor the leopard his spots; 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 79 

but man can be educated into, or out of, such habits 
as nature, reason, or experience teach him are de- 
structive or injurious to him or his race. As soon as 
any being rises to a scale of intelligent and rational 
action and accountability, he or she must have a (not 
the) standard of right and wrong, and both must be 
apparent and consistent to his or her capacity and 
development. Without it there certainly would be 
no accountability, and, I doubt, if there could possi- 
bly be intelligent action. All acts are not right; all 
acts are not wrong; all are not either right or wrong, 
but fall between both extremes. There is no uniform 
human standard of right and wrong ; never can be ; 
and the Divine standard is ever beyond human reach, 
and perfect in itself. Our acts are never judged by 
the Divine standard ; and, as we are not accountable 
to God, are never tried by it, but as we are account- 
able to ourselves and our race, we are tried by the con- 
sciousness within, and the statutes without, ourselves. 
Scars on the body are healed in this world ; scars on 
the spirit are only healed in the next ; and the latter 
are the sins against the Holy Ghost, spoken of in Scrip- 
ture (if it had any consistent meaning), and are not 
forgiven here or in the spirit world, but may be cured 
in time, as wounds are here on the body. Right and 
wrong apply to body and spirit ; are both physical and 
spiritual in application and effect; both are epheme- 
ral, and their effect transitory. There is no eter- 
nal right or wrong acts or effects, and no universal 
standard by which any one act is forever right or 
wrong, for it is subject to " variableness and shadow 
of turning." It is not safe or expedient to fix a 



80 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

standard of right and wrong for the acts of others 
than ourselves, neither as individuals or communities, 
for we cannot know the motives nor the conscience 
of the actors: but it is right and proper to establish 
statutory and legal enactments for protection of the 
weak against the strong, both for the weak in arm 
and the weak in intellect, and to keep these enact- 
ments before the whole people, and, of course, en- 
force them upon offenders as well as we can for the 
good of the violator and the safety of the innocent. 
Yet, by any such enactments, innocent persons must 
often suffer and be wronged both in the violation 
and execution of the law. It may not be proper to 
call it law, for legislatures never make laws ; they 
enact statutes, and sometimes discover laws and 
enact them into statutes; when they do this they 
have, so far, statutes that are in harmony with 
nature. 

Self-protection and self-preservation are, of course, 
right even if they sometimes require a wrong to an- 
other. The exact locality of the imaginary line 
between right and wrong is like the equator, uncer- 
tain, and never really ascertained ; but there is no 
difficulty in determining the difference between the 
frigid and torrid zone ; so there is no difficulty in 
deciding by our standards what is externally right 
and what is externally wrong in our judgment or 
our feelings, as we decide the heat or cold. A man 
raised in the torrid zone, and carried to Greenland, 
would call it cold, when the one raised there, and 
accustomed to that climate, would not perceive it 
cold at all. We ought to be wise enough to know 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 81 

our moral and religious standards are as different as 
those by which we judge of temperature, and we are 
no more to be condemned for the one than the other. 
The legal accountability of persons to known and 
acknowledged statutes of the government is a well 
and fully-established fact, and to me seems right. 
But the moral accountability of any person to any 
standard, except the conscience within, is not well 
established, and I cannot recognize any other for 
myself, and would not force mine on others. There 
are strange, and to us, with our present limited 
knowledge, mysterious laws working in us, and shap- 
ing us to ends and distances without our voluntary 
action, or even knowledge. For instance : it is a 
well-established fact that children born of a woman 
in her second marriage, after the death of her first 
husband, as often partake of the character and habits 
of the first as the second husband, and yet our sci- 
ence has no rational explanation to dispose of the 
fact. This, and many such facts, the laws for which 
are unknown, must affect vitally the rule of account- 
ability, and may establish at last the assertion that 
the sins of the fathers are visited on the children in 
several generations, and even scattered so as to affect 
psychologically other children than their own. In 
the above case, there can be no particles left by the 
first man that form part of the bodies of the succeed- 
ing man's children ; but there may be, and no doubt 
are, particles, elemental, left with the woman that 
go into and help to make up the spirit bodies of 
the children born at later periods from other fathers. 
We may find that the elements that make up the 



82 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

s]>i ritual body are gathered from more sources than 
those which make up the physical, and are secreted 
differently, retained longer in the female, and im- 
parted by equally natural law to form the real child, 
or spirit form. It is also well established thatia man 
will carry forward characteristics of a former and 
deceased wife, and give them to the children of a 
second or third wife. All those, and many more, 
such facts must be taken into account when we set 
up standards of right and wrong, and hold persons 
accountable to them. There can be little doubt of 
the correctness of Robert Owen's theory, that our 
characters are formed for us, and not by us ; but to 
me this would only modify and not destroy account- 
ability. It would only bring the moral standard 
within the line of circumference of each conscience, 
and under the jurisdiction of intelligent free agency. 
A Feejee to his conscience ; a Turk to his ; an Indian 
to his ; an African to his ; a Hindoo to his ; a Catho- 
lic Christian to his; and a Materialist to his, — each 
to his own standard, both of free agency and consci- 
ence. If Adam, in the fable, did not know good 
from evil, he could not be accountable for evil, of 
course, and Eve certainly could not be blamed for 
yielding to the allurements of the serpent, if they 
overpowered her feelings, and she had no knowledge 
of consequences, and especially as no command was 
given her not to eat the fruit. Individuals knowing no 
wrong can do none, and no standard outside of the 
person can decide for such person what is right or 
wrong ; but each intelligent person has a conscien- 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 83 

tious standard within, and by it must make a distinc- 
tion between acts that determine some to be right 
and others wrong, or opposite in quality. Right and 
wrong, good and evil, are relative. Existence, per- 
fection, and harmony are absolute and positive in the 
Divine Essence where the whole and its parts are 
forever the same. In its sphere all is right, and 
all the same perfection, — our Congregational and 
Episcopal convention resolutions and declarations of 
faith to the contrary notwithstanding. Where there 
is no language of words to represent conditions, of 
course there can never be right and wrong, and in 
the essence of the universe there is only perpetual 
harmony, order, and law. 

The finite standards of mortals, set up by tyrants, 
either as individuals, governments, or churches, to 
regulate the morals of human beings, have ever 
been nearly or quite as destructive as preservative of 
harmony, order, happiness, and human prosperity. 
Such institutions are, therefore, morally wrong. 

If the Divine Mind had created man with full 
powers of free agency, and at the same time so consti- 
tuted him that lie could commit a sin involving end- 
less misery, and even with a complete knowledge 
(which he never has had) of the terrible conse- 
quences of the sin, and man ever did commit the sin 
and suffer the penalty, there is not even a possibility 
of rescuing God from the consequences and responsi- 
bility, nor from having done a wrong action. For 
certainly in man such act, with the knowledge and 
power, would be wrong, and, of course, must also be 



84 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

in God by man's judgment. I cannot screen God 
from any law of justice, or of right and wrong, by 
which I try myself or my fellow-beings, so long as I 
bring his acts within the scope of human powers, 
capacities, and principles. 



CHAPTER V. 

DISCRETED DEGREES AND DISTINCTIVE ELEMENTS 
IN ORGANIC FORMS. — SEXUALITY. 

The simple and Omnipotent Essence filling all 
space, and blending in every form of being with the 
various and ever-varying exhibitions of substance, 
also in infinite space, produces the many discreted 
degrees of finite intelligence always in accordance 
with the peculiar combination of ingredients com- 
posing the form, in the same manner as the mixture 
of colors in painting produces the tints and shades. 

Distinct degrees exist in the essence germs of all 
forms, each permanent and eternal. The soul germ 
of a human being will never develop a frog or horse, 
if it cannot a man, and the essence germ of a dog 
will never ultimate a human being. Every kingdom 
works ever in its own world, but different species 
may, to a limited extent, hybridize even though 
science proves that two species cannot propagate 
in the hybrid, but must go or come to one side 
of the line, carrying the hybrid in. What distinct- 
ive features in the spirit bodies pertain to the differ- 
ent human species I cannot yet say. Whether the 
Kegro and Indian keep distinct features in their spirit 
forms permanently through that life, we have not 

(85) 



86 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

yet had fully established by the testimony of the few 
who have visited us from that country. If the dis- 
tinct degrees existed only in the outer forms of being, 
we might find human soul germs in animals, and be 
guilty of murder in taking their lives as much as 
in taking the life of a fellow-being at its birth. Yet 
the degree that distinguishes the human from the ani- 
mal may not establish a principle by which there 
could be a similar one between the different human 
species. Indeed, there may be no distinction be- 
tween the soul germ of one species and another of 
our race, and hence justice would require the same 
great and fundamental principles of honor and jus- 
tice to be exercised over each division of the race, 
even if weaker, especially by the stronger over the 
weaker in arm or intellect. A distinct degree in 
form may distinguish permanently a soul germ of 
man from that of an animal and not of an Indian 
from a Negro or Caucasian ; for under various and 
changed circumstances one can be made to possess 
all the qualities and characteristics of the other 
species, and this can be carried to a very great ex- 
tent ; but with no surrounding circumstances can 
any species of animals be made human, or any human 
be reduced fully to animal. There is an evident dif- 
ference between the soul germs of the individuals of 
the different kingdoms, and, for aught I know, may be 
between some species or races of men and animals. 

A question arises here in regard to sexuality. Is 
it not a permanent distinction of the soul germ, or 
essence? From such evidence as we now possess it 
seems not to be a distinction in the essence. Physi- 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 87 

ology gives sufficient evidence to induce in some 
minds the belief that it is only a physical condition of 
development. Mentally and spiritually each sex may 
represent the other, and some persons believe we 
have no sexual distinction in the spirit life ; but there 
is plenty of evidence of the sexuality in that life as 
distinct as in this, and also in the gestation that pre- 
cedes this, except in the first stages of that state and 
in the soul germ, where it cannot be detected if it 
exists. Some men are distinctly feminine, and some 
women masculine, in every essential quality of char- 
acter, and could easily pass through life as members 
of the sex to which they do not belong, if sufficiently 
cautious, and some fall physically between both sexes, 
— sexual abortions. It seems to be almost or quite 
certain that circumstances, partially under our con- 
trol, determine the sex of offspring ; and, no doubt, 
when we know more of the laws of generation, and 
depend more on generation than on regeneration for 
goodness and salvation, we may entirely control the 
sex of the child in and after conception. But it is 
not probable (nor, if my theory be correct, possible,) 
that human beings can be produced from the germs 
of animal life, nor in any but the human mold. I am 
aware that persons with acute feelings and obtuse 
intellect will shudder at a theory that peoples infi- 
nite space and eternal time with unconscious soul 
germs, ever seeking, by involuntary inherent uncon- 
scious action, embodiment in matter a "home for 
mind," and forever finding it, and living on and on, 
round and round, through circles and cycles of im- 
mense duration and countless numbers. This the- 



88 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

ory, when compared to the narrow system of Christi- 
anity, is like modern astronomy compared to the 
ancient, and startles the thinker and feeler in much 
the same manner as that system did when first 
broached. I claim for this theory little, if any, origi- 
nality. It has been set forth, at least in fragments 
and parts, perhaps the whole of it, and I only put it 
together in my feeble and imperfect way. When 
we understand the laws of generation, and observe 
them in our race, even as well as stock-breeders do 
in those of animals, we shall soon see the fallacy of the 
doctrine of depravity, original sin, and Adam's fall. 
"When we learn that with the soul germs of Divine 
Essence, pure and perfect, every form of human 
being is started, and that we furnish the material for 
both body and spirit forms, and train the form in its 
physical and spiritual growth as we dc a plant in the 
garden or green-house, we shall then know that 
society is to a great degree responsible for the con- 
duct and character of its individuals, and mainly for 
the acts of its criminal victims. The most deplorable 
picture which our nation and civilization presents is 
the reckless manner in which our laws of marriage, 
and social standard of morals, peoples our country 
with victims of lust, depravity, dissipation, supersti- 
tion, selfishness, revenge, and every vice that is so 
prevalent in our cities and large towns. Could the 
veil be lifted that hides the real life of our public, 
popular men and women, and especially the profes- 
sional, and most especially the clergy, from outer 
observation, and the knowledge of character with the 
knowledge of persons as they are in the other life, 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 89 

how astonished would the more honest and deceived 
masses be ? No pen can write, no tongue can tell, 
what a nauseous mass of corruption is often hidden 
under the outer garb of popularity and clerical sanc- 
tity. After many years of study, observation, and 
research, with extraordinary means and facilities for 
gaining knowledge of the real and true social state 
in our country, I am constantly awakened and 
startled by new discoveries revealing degrees of 
social depravity that more and more strengthen the 
doctrine of its totality, and justify the Christian 
consciousness on which it has been mainly based, 
with Bible testimony, and might give its advocates 
a strong position were it not a fact that their regen- 
erated souls and exempted saints are as bad as others, 
and that we can find the cause in the wicked, deceit- 
ful, false, and corrupting institutions of our Chris- 
tian country. As well might we attribute the foot- 
rot in sheep to total depravity in the nature of sheep 
as to attribute scrofula in the body, or lust in the 
passions of a human being, to depravity, and as well 
pray God to remove the disease from the sheep as 
from our children while we feed ourselves and them 
on pork, whiskey, tobacco, and other scrofulous and 
lust-supplying substances. Some writer says : " There 
is no use talking about religion with no flour in the 
house," so there is no use talking about purity of 
the affections with a mouth full of tobacco and the 
stomach full of swine's flesh and fat, preserved in 
poison-whiskey. While we will use it, and marry 
our most vicious, dissolute, corrupt, vulgar, wicked, 
profane, and dissipated men and women for fathers 



90 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

and mothers of the next generation, how can we 
expect any but a depraved race? If God does it, no 
human breeder of stock docs as badly. Certainly, in 
society, as it now is, especially in the large cities, 
this class does a large share of the breeding; in the 
better and more moral families there are generally 
far less children born, and more of those born die in 
infancy. Is there, or is there not, any remedy? 
Christianity has none, or has applied none ; neither 
has the State as yet found a remedy. Neither can it 
while we admit the doctrine of natural total deprav- 
ity, and the God-creation of all children when born 
with corrupt and depraved natures inherited from 
Adam. If God is the parent of all children, and 
author of all existence, what right has man to estab- 
lish any rules, except such as God has given and set 
up for the regulation and propagation of the race ? 
Of course, none ; and hence the Church sets up and 
establishes her law of marriage as God-given and 
ordained by Him, and the State enacts it ; and the 
corruptions follow, because it is unnatural, and an 
abuse of nature to put woman into the power of man, 
and bind her by law or religion to such corrupt and 
lustful bodies and souls as we are constantly breed- 
ing in our diseased condition of sexuality, and under 
authority of Church and State. 

Summing up, and setting forward this subject, we 
it that the Divine Essence in human soul germs 
lias, from all eternity, in the midst of an infinite 
number of worlds, been unconsciously collecting, 
developing, ripening, and abandoning organic human 
forms, each of which has been more or less varied in 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 91 

material, quality, quantity, and structure, by sur- 
rounding circumstances at its organic formation, 
which has ever, and in each, varied the quantity and 
degree of intelligence, free agency, and moral account- 
ability, all of which are the qualities of essence and 
substance combined in an organic human form, — 
coming with it and ceasing with it, to be renewed 
again in the next ; shutting us up and opening us 
by the same law and uniformity that we are shut 
and opened in by sleep and wakefulness which we 
soon learn not to dread as annihilation. In sleep we 
are not accountable, intelligent, or conscious ; and 
it is as virtually annihilation as is the space the 
soul germ walks over between two worlds, or two 
organic bodies. In this theory we can see the neces- 
sity of properly surrounding every soul germ that 
enters and commences a form in our world, and of 
properly nursing and providing for its perfect and 
harmonious development of a good body and spirit 
form, that its career of life here and with our earth 
may be a pleasant and profitable one to itself and all 
it associates with. 

It is not more strange or inconsistent that essence 
should be particled in soul germs than that matter 
such as we can deal with chemically should be par- 
ticled. The particles of iron are different from those 
of gold, and the one cannot be changed to the other 
even in form. Those of light are different from the 
electric particles, etc. There are constitutional and 
absolute differences in the forms of the simple parti- 
cles in these and other cases, and no chemical disso- 
lution and recombination can change them. They 



92 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

are permanent, the flat particle in gold giving it the 
greatest maleability of any metal, and the globular 

particle of iron enabling ns to work fine wire threads, 
etc. Why may not essence be *as well and as per- 
manently particled in germs of being, some of which 
forever make up the human form, and some the ani- 
mal, and some the vegetable, and those particles not 
only make up the form, but the quality thus and so 
formed in so far as specific powers are concerned for 
each kingdom? When once we enter into and en- 
gage in experiments and speculation in this interior 
realm of being, we may find as great a field for dis- 
covery and theory as in that of outer and ponderable 
matter. If we could once lift off the great fiat stone 
of superstition and bigotry, and search in the spirit 
world of forms as we do in chemistry, there is no 
counting the treasures that would be found awaiting 
us in these rich mines of essence and substance. 

Love is undoubtedly particled material substance, 
which enters into the combination and formation of 
the human form and spirit body, and if sexual passion 
is to be attributed to it, it also enters into the forma- 
tion of our other bodies and those of animals, if not 
of plants. The sexual passion may be an element 
separate and of somewhat similar, and somewhat dis- 
similar, nature from love, and yet be often drawn in 
and blended with the element of love. It is cer- 
tain that there are many ways in which love shows 
its strongest powers without a sign of the sex- 
ual feeling, — as in a mother's love for her child, 
which is, perhaps, the strongest expression of love 
we find on earth ; but the love of some males and 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 93 

females, who have had no sexual relations, is perhaps 
sometimes as strong, if not stronger, and such is sel- 
dom strengthened, but often weakened, by more inti- 
mate sexual union. Sometimes the new element (if 
it be one), or the new and extended expression of 
love in sexual passion after marriage, centralizes and 
often destroys the first pure and strong courtship, 
love of each sex, and quite often of the female. 
There are strong grounds for asserting that sexual 
passion exists in, or is produced by, another and 
grosser element than pure love. Certainly the love 
of God, of which Christians talk so much, if it have 
any existence at all (which I sometimes doubt) has 
not manifested this passion in its earthly parentage, 
and also the love for God, where females love Jesus 
through the beautiful pictures of Him in the Catho- 
lic churches, or the ideal pictures in other churches, 
and where the church is called the bride or wife of 
Jesus : sometimes, at least in low and sensual organi- 
zations, such may bring in the sexual passion in feel- 
ing, if not language. There are plenty of cases of 
love without a single sign or emotion of passion of 
this nature, and such prove that love can and does 
exist without the thought of sexuality, and often 
sexuality exists without any passion, if not without 
love. The peculiar manifestation of sexual passion 
in animals, and especially in the female, and to some 
extent also in our race in that sex, would go to show 
that it was not the effect of love, but of some element 
more fluctuating and partially periodical in some 
organizations where love is strong and permanent, or 
where it is almost wanting. In some the passion is 



04 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

very strong, and love can scarcely be detected; in oth- 
ers, love is very strong all the time, and this passion 
entirely wanting, or only periodical and slight. Fur- 
ther inquiry and experiment may satisfy ns of the 
existence of two distinct elements producing these 
manifestations, and in some persons, or cases, or sea- 
sons, blended in producing the effects we witness of 
mutual love and sexual passion, and in others the 
one and not the other, even though sexuality and 
proper physical relations exist for both at the time. 
The infinite region and infinite variety of substance 
no doubt includes many elements which are only 
recognized by us in their effects which we witness, 
and which are often attributed to wrong causes. It 
is, indeed, a serious question how far the element of 
love is subject to the intellect or free agency of the 
mind. We are, by our pious and God-loving Chris- 
tians, held to be accountable for not loving God and 
the church, even though we find no love in us, and 
cannot get any from those around us. Of course, if 
we are without the element, we cannot give it, and 
if we have it, it is doubtful if we can give it by any 
voluntary action of the intellect, with the will for an 
executive officer. Superficial minds that know noth- 
ing about philosophy prate about free love, and also 
about God being Love, in which case, of course, 
Love is God, and would be free in whole and in part 
in defiance of all human power; but Love is not 
God, nor more free than electricity or other elements, 
nor more subject to the will or intellect of man. 
Both are subject to laws, and so far as we can con- 
trol the laws we control the elements subject to them 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 95 

respectively. When men understand that both love 
and the sexual passion are elements, or an element, 
and that they and their effects are subject to laws, as 
electricity and other elements, we shall better know 
how to establish rules to regulate it. If the mater- 
nal and paternal attachments are the effects of love, 
it is certainly found in animals ; and if the attach- 
ment we call love of God is to be attributed to the 
same element, there might be some corresponding 
feature in animals ; and yet we find none, and attrib- 
ute the cause to the organic structure in the lack of 
religious organs in the brain. But this theory puts 
it in the essence, or soul germ, where there exists a 
fundamental and eternal distinction, making of them 
separate kingdoms. Yet, as lime and other ingre- 
dients of a ponderable nature are found in common 
as parts of the forms in both kingdoms, so may love 
and lust be, and yet they may be so ethereal and 
subtle as to compose a part of the spiritual bodies of 
human beings as well as to be manifest in the outer 
forms of both kingdoms. Society will some day be 
able to regulate its institutions so as to avoid the 
terrible calamities arising from our miserable system 
of propagation under the almost universally-forced 
relation of maternity in marriage, and the usually 
accidental cases out of marriage. It seems strange 
that we cannot treat the subject of love, marriage, 
parentage, and sexual intercourse scientifically as 
we would any other subject, and by that means 
secure the necessary knowledge fur improving the 
race in each succeeding generation. At present, 
society is debased, increased, and degraded by the 



OG ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

tyranny and bondage of social organizations rather 
than improved, especially in our large cities, where de- 
pravity much more prevails. There is no subject on 
which the people are so ignorant, which is important 
in life, as the propagation of the race, and sexual 
relations of life. Marriage usually unites two young 
persons, one or both utterly and entirely ignorant of all 
that pertains to their sexual passions, and, of course, 
utterly disqualified to become parents, and in their 
new relation to secure health, harmony, and happi- 
ness. Why not educate them scientifically on the mari- 
tal relations, and the use and abuse of themselves, as 
on diet, disease, respiration, etc. ? A breeder of ani- 
mals would be called a poor and foolish speculator who 
would breed constantly only from diseased animals, 
and more especially if he paired and mated simply on 
the sexual attraction which draws many men and wo- 
men into marriage. But the rule of breeding animals 
will not in all respects apply to the distinctive human 
kingdom, which is a spiritual one, and has laws espe- 
cially pertaining to itself ; } r et, so far as the laws of or- 
ganic corporal growth and physiological life are con- 
cerned, there are many laws common to both, which 
might be with good effect applied to the human as suc- 
cessfully as to animals, and yet need not disturb or in- 
trude on the permanent dual sexual relations of true 
marriage, which we believe is natural. Of all the 
evils which each generation transmits to its successor, 
no one is more deplorable than the system of promis- 
cuous breeding which is mostly covered by legalized 
marriage, which every pair, however ignorant, are 
permitted to carry on as they please, without the 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 97 

least regard to qualification in themselves for par 
ents, or ability to support and educate offspring, 
resulting in the introduction of soul germs into 
forms, often under most unsuitable conditions, and, 
in Christian society, ascribing the evils that ensue 
to God, while the parents, by voluntary action, often 
unwise and inconsistent, started the organic forms 
upon their career of growth. As there is room 
enough, and time enough, for all germs, each is en- 
titled to the best conditions. A true system of 
anthropology, applied practically to human life and 
society, would be a great blessing, and its effects 
felt beneficially ; but we can never have such until 
we deal with the real and simple elements of the 
body and spirit form, and discover the laws that 
can control them both in the love relations and pas- 
sions of the sexes, and especially in the propagation 
of the race. Arbitrary laws that unite two of opposite 
sex, without regard to their fitness for parentage, and 
yet so bound as to make them parents, can never 
reform the race. How far nature establishes a single 
and exclusive sexual and passional attraction as a 
basis of the marriage relations, I have no scientific 
or philosophical evidence to enable me to decide; 
but I am sure that in the male sex at least, so far as 
history and observation can testify, exclusiveness has 
been the exception and not the rule in the passions of 
married and unmarried parties. And if we take the 
love relations independent of sexual passion, exclusive- 
ness is again the exception in females. Society does 
not so much object to variety in love if the sexual is 
confined by marriage, even though the latter disease 



98 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

or degrade the offspring. It is plain to all who study 
society as it is that our marriage laws, as they now 
are, hind together more who are not congenial, and 
would part, were it not for the law and public opin- 
ion, than of those who are congenial, and would not 
part. It is also certain that if free, and left to them- 
selves, those who are exclusive, congenial, and do 
not wish to part, would still remain united, and be 
the ones, if not the only ones, who really ought to 
live together, and if otherwise adapted to it, raise 
their share of the children. I am sure that law does 
not make people love each other, even though it can 
make them live together, and pretend to love. Law 
can restrain the passions, and it ought to do 'so far 
more than it does, and ought to protect a woman as 
much against her husband as against any other man 
when he is forcing on her maternity, or ruining her 
health by personal abuse, even degrading her morals. 
But to return to the elemental origin of the pas- 
sions, and renew the questions : Does or does not the 
sexual passion of man and beast originate in, and 
arise from, the same elemental source as the love of 
a mother for her offspring ? of the love of a Christian 
for his God? or the fraternal love of dear friends? 
Does or does not the passional love of a refined, sen- 
sitive, and spiritual woman for flowers or paintings 
arise in and from the same element and source as the 
love of a drunkard for rum, or a glutton for meat? 
Are there distinct elements producing these distinct 
attractions, or does the same element produce these 
varieties and shades of manifestation? I cannot 
answer these questions from any scientific experi- 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 99 

ments or philosophical principles as yet established, 
but incline to the side of variety in elemental origin 
and mixture of elements. I do not believe one is 
evil and the other good, but each subject to both 
terms by turns, and in different actions both good or 
bad. A love of paintings may run to bawdy and vul- 
gar pictures; and a sexual passion may lead the male 
to defend, protect, rescue, and secure the welfare of 
his victim. How we can make laws to control or 
regulate the elements of love and passion, without 
knowing the nature of them, and do justice to all 
parties, I know not. That there is a large number 
of elements in our physical and spiritual bodies which 
produce the various passional actions is evident. 
How to regulate them so as to produce the best 
effects and results to society should be the study of 
all who seek the interest and welfare of the race. It 
is evident that a large part of the passional inter- 
course between human beings is merely mechanical, 
and arises mostly from habit, and produces the most 
debased moral and destructive physical results upon 
the victims, more so than the use of tobacco or intoxi- 
cating drinks, which are bad enough; and these evils 
cannot be cured until we discover and use the laws 
that regulate the elements which are the source and 
cause of the passions. It is undoubtedly the sub- 
stances within us seeking affinities that produce 
both the passional attractions and the appetites. 
Pus in the body, producing scrofula, almost inva- 
riably craves its affinity in swine's flesh and lard 
cakes. So, also, a nervous and irritable condition of 
the system, produced by tobacco, requires narcotics 



100 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

and stimulants to feed the system with materials to 
keep it up. Thousands of people take tobacco or 
tea to quiet their nerves or arouse them to action 
from an unnatural state, caused by the very material 
sent to relieve it, on the Hanneraan plan of "hair of 
the same dog curing the bite.' , Our systems of treat- 
ment are nearly all wrong in dealing with effects 
instead of causes, venting our spite on victims, often 
innocent, for they are the inherited and organic evils 
of individuals. If we had a system of education that 
would draw off or neutralize the excessive elements, 
and supply the deficient, we could cure or prevent 
most of the evils that afflict society and its members. 
There are principles underlying all human actions 
and elements producing them ; and when we find 
the elements, as we have distinctly, we can put up 
lightning-rods to prevent the passions from striking, 
and conducting-wires to carry off and carry on the 
elemental circulations in the human organism, as 
well as in the outer and inorganic matter of our 
world. Love is not subject to the will or intellect, 
irrespective of circumstances and conditions, but 
only by and through laws. It is an element more 
dangerous for the ignorant than electricity or mag- 
netism, or any of the gases, and we are easily blown 
up by it if ignorant of the laws that regulate it. The 
passional expression of love we try to regulate by 
law, but succeed so poorly it is unless to talk of free 
love, or bound love, or conjugal love, until we can 
consistently deal with it by the laws of nature that 
can regulate and control it, which I believe are as 
simple as the laws that control electricity. 



CHAPTER VI. 

CIRCLES AND CYCLES OF HUMAN EXISTENCE. 

We will now speculate upon the deeper philosophy 
of life, death, and immortality. Having laid out the 
timbers, and prepared the several parts of the struct- 
ure, I will endeavor to put them together into a sys- 
tem of life that is eternal, or endless. The reader 
will pardon me if I take my own case, and, in per- 
sonifying it, find the line, or path, of all human 
beings. I am now an inhabitant of the solar system, 
and of the particular planet Earth, and in the first 
circle of earth life, where all soul germs enter that 
have bodies, either physical or spiritual, on or around 
this planet. I shall go through all the strata grades 
and discreted degrees of human (spirit) life that 
belong to this planet before I leave it, and so will all 
who enter forms here, but none are born (or created) 
out of, or above, this plane in which I now reside. 
This is the germinal or gestation sphere or stratum 
of this, as the solid matter of each planet is of its 
own inhabitants, — the soil in which the seeds are 
planted. I may have, probably did, pass from Venus, 
and from the outer and last sphere of that planet, 
where I left my last spirit form, and washing the 
soul germ in the lethean stream between it and earth, 

(101) 



102 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

resting a night between two days of my eternal life, 
awoke and began my earthly life in this sphere as I 
had done before in a remote period, far away in 
time, — too far in centuries for the "reeling brain" 
to compute. I may have, probably did, pass to 
Venus from Mercury, where I had filled the measure 
of my life and traced the circle of that planet from 
its lowest to its highest condition of human form and 
fineness. I may, or I may not (do not yet even con- 
jecture), have passed from the Sun to Mercury, or I 
may have passed from the outer planet and outer cir- 
cle of the outer planet of some other sun or star; and, 
having completed the cycle of that sun and its planets, 
passed the deep lethean stream and left all its sub- 
stance behind, entered upon a new cycle and the 
many new circles, or planets, that pertain to it ; and 
when I have run my course outward through every 
stratum of each planet, and thus completed the cycle 
of the Sun, I shall be ready to pass on to another 
sun and its planets, and thus continue my eternal 
life. But only the soul germ passes on this ; only 
the essence, or divine part, of me, and of each of us, 
moves on, and lives on thus forever, forming new 
and ever-changing bodies in the infinite variety of 
substances which it uses for its forms, and in which 
it lives and dies continually, forever renewing its 
existence and powers of expression and enjoyment. 
The space or time between each planet, or system of 
planets, is like the night between two days, and while 
thus conditioned our experience is like that of sleep- 
unconsciousness, and it makes no difference to us 
whether it is one or one thousand years, as it makes no 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 103 

difference to us when we sleep whether the time is one 
or ten hours. The interior or divine germ of each hu- 
man being has thus run its eternal career of life unto 
death, and death unto life, never losing its identity, 
and never securing an immortal body, nor is it more 
likely to secure one on this earth than it has been on 
other planets before, and, indeed, it never can in its 
career of endless activity, as such result would put a 
stop to change, and be to it little else than inertia, 
or annihilation. It is a great stretch of the mind to 
even conceive of an infinity of worlds and systems of 
worlds, and the endless round of nakedness and 
clothing which the soul germ has before and behind 
its here and now. It is a remarkable degree of 
power for a finite being to comprehend its world and 
itself in connection with the w r orld on which it lives 
at the time of calculation, but to stretch out and 
grope after a whole system of worlds, and the cycle 
of being walking over them forever — an entity, for- 
ever human, forever safe and self-existent — is too 
much for the capacity of most minds in this life ; but 
in the manhood of our race, when we get out of these 
shells and this gestation state, we can more easily 
comprehend and understand it. Like astronomy, it 
is too sublime and vast for the young student, but 
adapted to some expanded minds: it has cost me 
years of hard and close study to receive and accept 
it. The periods of time that it takes a soul germ to 
pass through all the discreted degrees, or spirit 
spheres of each world or globe, is no doubt different 
with different individuals ; but evidently each germ, 
when once encased and entered upon its journey, 



104 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

tiikes a through ticket, and goes to the ultimate, last, 
or most eliminated circle of the globe, and thence to 
another system or sun with its planets. New created 
bodies are constantly rising up before us, and spirit 
forms inhabit them awhile, then, casting them off, as 
a healed cripple would his crutches, walk without 
them on the ether, supplying the elemental form from 
corresponding material with as much ease and as 
little effort as we supply the lungs with air in this 
life. When the necessities of labor to support the 
body are no longer burdening us, we shall have ample 
time for spiritual growth, mental development, and 
enjoyment which we cannot have in this life of trial, 
trouble, and pain. It would not be strange if, in 
such a sphere of being, we should recall some part 
of past life anterior to our gestation here, and add 
some snatches of recollection to the philosophy of 
eternal existence which must surely be clear in that 
higher life. If all organizations are aggregations of 
simple particles of matter, there must surely be a 
germ of sufficient essential potency to begin and con- 
tinue the collection and arrangement of such parti- 
cles, so as to make the specific form ; and, if this were 
a blind and unguided effort of matter alone, there 
would be no uniformity in species or kingdoms, but 
one species of animal or plant would bring forth 
forms of other animals and plants, and the human 
kingdom would bring forth animals, and animals 
human children. It is certain the forms are not like 
castings in a furnace, run in molds, each form to take 
shape or size from the mold, but the depositories are 
reservoirs in which varieties of forms can be devel- 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 105 

oped, as we see by the various abortions and malfor- 
mations in our race. The type is evidently in the 
soul germ which molds and guides the form in its 
first stages of development, and gives its own form 
to the outer shape in every instance where the work 
is not interrupted by causes that disturb the mechan- 
ical operation of construction of parts. 

There is law, order, and intelligence guiding the 
formation of children ; and he must be a dunce who 
attributes it to marriage, or to the parents, or the 
direct and especial agency of God. It certainly 
is not the guiding intelligence of the parents that 
gives form to the child, and is not accidental. Two 
other explanations have been brought forward with 
authority to inform the youthful inquirer how we 
came into being and shape as we are. One is that 
Nature does it. If so, Nature is not totally depraved, 
and it certainly is intelligent; and, if intelligent, 
may as well be called God at once, as we shall need 
no other to account for all phenomena. This would 
be falling back to Pantheism, and to a rational system 
at least of giving a name and power to nature suffici- 
ent to harmonize the universe without other God or 
intelligence, and, indeed, it might be stretched suffi- 
ciently to cover entirely any system of explanations 
for all existence; for to me all is natural and in 
accordance with Law, and Law is God. The other 
explanation is that of Christians, that God superin- 
tends the formation of all human bodies for the pur- 
pose of putting souls in them to be damned or saved 
for His own glory to all eternity. If this be so, He 
is culpable for all the births out of unholy wedlock, 



106 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

and for all the abortions and idiots and malforma- 
tions in it, and for all defects of body which so often 
cause sin as well as suffering through life; and if lie 
work in and through nature, which He controls, He 
is not less culpable for all these defects. If there is 
a God superintending the making of children, He is 
either wicked, ignorant, or incompetent. But this 
is only childish folly, and too silly to be repeated to 
intelligent minds, and we must seek some more con- 
sistent explanation of the birth of human bodies and 
souls. 

In the infinite universe of essence and substance 
are countless millions of soul germs, by inherent, in- 
stinctive, unconscious, and involuntary action, ever 
seeking encasement in forms, and moving, by Law, 
from planet to planet in a law of affinity and attrac- 
tion which bears them on, as liberated gases are 
borne to upper strata by specific gravity when libe- 
rated from lower; and as these soul germs are them- 
selves distinctive in form, they use the best means at 
hand to build the form in which they can ultimate, 
and often falliug short in quantity, quality, or sur- 
roundings, they furnish the abortions and malforma- 
tions from which they escape with or without a 
spirit form. If with one, they go on to complete the 
man or womanhood in the spirit spheres ; if without 
one, the germ still seeks in the earth encasement, 
and finds success at last in starting a form that ulti- 
mates and ripens, by which it is enabled to pass 
through the " gate of birth" into the spirit realm 
into which it can only come with its form taken on 
in the rudimental sphere. Soul germs, following the 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 107 

law of forms, must enter our, and each, planet in the 
stratum of ponderable matter, and be clothed in it to 
reach the next, or any other. As well might we 
talk of having children without conception or gesta- 
tion as of having spirits in the spheres that were not 
born in the rudimental world. As we go to the 
proper place and materials for garments for the body, 
so we must for the spirit, and also for the soul germ. 
Soul germs move by specific laws from planet to 
planet, and from system to system, entering each in 
its inner belt of matter where forms can be organized, 
and gravitating outward through every stratum of 
organic life, from base to summit, and at the outer 
belt casting off the last particle belonging to that 
planet, its day of life was reached, its covering and 
the germ of essence is prepared to retire for its night 
of unconsciousness and rest, from which it awakes at 
the base of another world, and again begins its 
renewed day of toil aud reward. 

The involuntary, unconscious, and inherent action 
of soul germs in seeking encasement in forms of mat- 
ter accounts for the success and failures, abortions 
and malformations by a uniform law that has no re- 
gard for human institutions of marriage or prostitu- 
tion. The germs seek their destiny and start into 
form wherever conditions admit, and all find, sooner 
or later, the starting-point, and begin the life that 
ultimates in full germ forms, and lives to its old age 
in spirit life. For a long period in the geologic his- 
tory of the earth no human forms were upon its sur- 
face, but the earth had not then reached its age of 
puberty ; it was not in a bearing condition. To us, 



108 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

finite beings, only was the time long. Childhood 
seems long to children, and the childhood of a planet 
to man. To infinity and in eternity one day is as a 
thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. 
There can be no loss of time to that which is immor- 
tal or eternal. A soul germ can lose no time, and 
gain none. Hence we lose nothing and gain nothing 
by length of time between worlds or in worlds (I mean 
globes, including all the spirit spheres with each). 
Since this divine essence is part of God, and, conse- 
quently, forever perfect, and perfectly harmonious, 
IT can never suffer, suffering belonging entirely to 
the form and its imperfections and temporary phases 
of ephemeral existence and relative position. 



CHAPTER VII. 

MISCELLANEOUS. 

Germs of truth wander about the human world 
sometimes for centuries before some finite intelli- 
gence secures them, and encases them in a consistent 
theory or philosophic system, for truth is admitted 
to be immortal. Such were the facts of incarnation, 
or reincarnation, of transmigration, of pre-existence, 
of eternal life, of compensation, of spiritual life, and 
progression, etc. All of these, and many more, have 
each a consistent place and mission in this system of 
life, death, and immortality, as we live it, in circles 
of worlds, and cycles of systems of worlds ; but, in 
their fragmentary wanderings in the past, they have 
had no consistent theory combining them, and while 
each was a truth in itself when rightly understood 
and applied, yet added to untruths and inconsistent 
theories, the virtue and value was lost. Among the 
most absurd attempts to embody pre-existence in a 
system is that of Edward Beecher, in his Conflict of 
Ages, setting it up wholly as an excuse for total de- 
pravity, which he believes we bring here from a fall, 
or sin, in the previous state, which was a spiritual 
one. This world would, indeed, be a hell for such 
if Orthodoxy were the only religion, and had truth 

(109) 



110 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

for its basis of the future state of existence. It seems 
strange that some truths lie dormant so long, or are 
so long in being taken up and put in suitable forms 
of theory and demonstration. Such was the power of 
steam, known over twenty years before applied to 
mechanical purposes. 

The different species of our race on earth evidently 
have different routes and spheres, if not different des- 
tinies after leaving the rudimental or germinal sphere 
of this life. The Negro, the Indian, the Caucasian, 
and the Malay have each ruling and peculiar general 
characteristics which distinguish them, and unfit them 
for that closer intimacy which binds the individuals 
of each species, or the families and nations of each 
together. It is hardly probable that these character- 
istics will be less peculiar, or less distinctive, in the 
first stages of spirit life than here. In fact, we all 
widen into individuality as we recede from childhood, 
and are all more and most alike when infants, both 
as species and as individuals of the same species. 
There is a geographical adaptation, or a climatic one, 
which in the earth life distinguishes the species as well 
as a physiological and psychological one. Whether 
the fust has any effect beyond this life I know not; 
but the latter evidently will. As we go out farther 
from the center, and beyond the surface of the solid 
parts of our world, the region is vastly greater, and 
varieties of condition may be more or less abundant 
and permanent. There is room enough for all that 
are born on earth, and time enough for each species 
and eaeli individual to ripen and mature, and pass on 
to other worlds. The moon and the satellites of other 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. Ill 

planets may have a class and grade of beings differ- 
ent from us, or there may be some spirits more fitted 
for such worlds. Nature does not mold all intelli- 
gences after one pattern. Soul germs of essence may 
exist, varied in form from us, and varied from each 
and all of the species of our race, as the widest of 
our species differ, and yet have the same immortality 
we do. Since there is time enough and room enough, 
and can be no crowding, even if the animals are 
taken in, as there are no new soul germs created, we 
may safely infer that the space is all and well filled, 
and to the best advantage for the highest happi- 
ness of all organized forms in matter, ultimated from 
the action of essence. 

Each being may be required to remain in, and con- 
fined to, each stratum of life and being till fitted for 
the next, and that may involve reincarnation, as 
some teach it. This earth life, not being a stratum 
but a gestation, the next, or spirit sphere near us, 
may hold all till progressed and fitted for the next ; 
the spirits of children, and rude, undeveloped men 
and women, must stay near their earthly homes and 
friends till fitted to take their places in more har- 
monized and developed circles. No doubt, much of 
our correspondence with spirits is with this class who 
are mainly as ignorant as the minds in bodies, and, 
consequently, we seldom get wisdom of higher grade 
from spirits than we have taught on earth ; but this 
is not evidence there is no higher, but only evidence 
that we communicate with our nearest neighbors. 
For the spirit spheres being stratified, and each soul, 
as it leaves the body, gravitating to its specific level 



112 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 



of intellect and affection, of course, many of the best 
are quite remote from our selfish grasp and sensual 
world, and can only reach us with distorted messages, 
often through several mediums, each of whom lessens 
the vitality and spirit of the message that started. If 
you doubt this, let a rude, unlettered boy read some 
beautiful poem or speech, and then let one who can 
enter into the spirit and sense of the subject read it, 
and see the contrast ; and apply this to the messages 
you get from refined and advanced spirits, and you 
will not wonder they send us so few messages when 
they are obliged to use such mediums, or none. 

To many, I am aware, this will seem a slender 
thread that holds us to eternal life through the strata 
of spheres in each world, and through the cycles of 
life in the systems of worlds and eternal time; but 
it is the only thread I can follow out into infinite 
space and eternal time to which I can hold to keep 
me from being lost in the universal dissolution of 
organic forms. It is also the only thread I can find 
to bind me to Deity, and on which I can follow the 
essence of Divinity in the finite forms of intelligent 
beings, and run each forward in that thread to 
immortality. 

The Westminster Review for July, 1865, in an arti- 
cle on Herbert Spencer's Principles of Biology, fur- 
nishes me a text for my whole subject which has been 
written, and came to my hand at this stage of my 
work, and is as follows: "The organic body consti- 
tutes the point at which man touches the world." 
There are several strong and beautiful points in this 
article beside the foregoing, which I would gladly 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 113 

incorporate into this work, but prefer to refer the 
reader to the whole article, where he can follow the 
writer from a pure fountain of truth in nature into a 
muddy pool of Christian theology, where all great 
truths lose their beauty and purity alike, and into 
which all writers for the popular magazines of Amer- 
ica and Europe are alike obliged to drift with all arti- 
cles to secure for them an insertion. If a writer 
sets out with a valuable truth, like the foregoing, 
and several others in the same article, he must soon 
spoil its natural beauty by covering with the slime 
of supernaturalism, or the sophistry of Divine good- 
ness, or the false logic of especial Providence, and, 
thus dressed up, put it into the church to be pre- 
served as a sacred relic or Divine revelation foe 
man's salvation. It is well there are some men in 
our time like Buckle, Lecky, Emerson, and others, 
who can, and will, occasionally separate a natural 
truth from the artificial covering in which church 
writers cover and dress it for the devotion of the 
multitude. Soon as we can get this important truth 
of man's existence before conception and after death as 
a naked truth before human intellect and reason for 
dissection, examination, and analysis, we shall settle 
the most important question ever raised: and as the 
knowledge of the naturalist would soon prove, on 
examination, that the bony relics of saints in the 
cathedrals belong mostly to animals of late species, 
instead of being, as claimed, the bones of saints and 
martyrs of early church dates ; so the scientific ex- 
amination of the truths in the church would soon 
prove they were natural, not supernatural, and ex- 



114 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 



isted entirely independent, with all their powers, 
from all Bible, religious, or Divine revelation. The 
organic body is truly the point where man, or the 
soul germ, touches the earth, and touches it only for 
a moment, branching off again into more ethereal 
regions where higher powers and enjoyments await 
it, without any regard to God, Jesus, atonement, 
judgment, or resurrection, it being a scientific and 
not a religious truth, existing in nature and not in 
revelation, without need to be bolstered up by any 
form of sectarian superstition. Even in the church the 
world moves by such men as Colenso, Strauss, and 
Kenan, and many others, to new religious truths, as 
it has by aid of Galileo, Newton, Franklin, etc., to 
new scientific truths, and as it is now doing in our 
day by the work of Parker, Emerson, Beecher, Froth- 
ingham, Colyer, etc. The ablest minds in the churches 
are constantly rejecting, one after another, the old 
rotten dogmas of early superstition, and looking up 
the truths of science and Spiritualism as a basis for 
discourses in the pulpit, and all these are signs of 
progress. 

A cardinal and vital truth in Christianity is that 
Jesus had a pre-existence, and since he was born 
into this life from one before it, we may as well 
accept the fact, and extend it to the whole race, and 
each individual in it; for it is not more unreason- 
able, unnatural, or impossible for any other person 
to have had a pre-existence than for Jesus. If I 
were disposed to call in the New Testament to my 
aid, I could find support in it, and although not an 
authority to me, it is to many people good authority. 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 115 

Jesus is said to have told persons in the other life 
that what good deeds they did in this life to their 
fellow-beings they did to Him, and to have attrib- 
uted to others the same common parentage of God 
the Father, which, of course, gave all a Divine pre- 
existence, if he had one. 

We accept the Christian authority that Jesus lived 
before he was conceived in this world, and I extend 
the same law and fact to all his brethern and sisters 
of earth life, and as we believe in eternal life which 
cannot be proved with a beginning, I submit to the 
Christian world whether it will give up the pre- 
existence of its Jesus, or admit his teachings, that 
all men are like him in origin and destiny. "If I 
go, I will draw all men," etc. "The Lord giveth, 
and the Lord taketh away" life. Then He had it to 
give, and has it when taken back ; and what is the 
Lord, or God, but Law ? and what can It give but 
what it possesses? Apply this to the Divine Es- 
sence, and you have this theory. 

It seems useless to spin out this argument, since 
the truth is embodied in a nut-shell space. We are 
either circles or straight lines, and with two ends, or 
none. If the latter, we had pre-existence, and, if the 
former, must end this by the law that began it. 
Individual testimony of persons in this life, who draw 
from fragments of memory, we may regard of some 
importance, although not wholly reliable, and yet it 
may be somewhat like spiritual vision which some 
persons do possess here, but in such imperfect degree 
that death seems to open to them a new world, and 
a new vision, about as strange and distinct from this 



116 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

us to those who never had a spiritual sight in this 
life. 

It is the philosophy of the other life that makes it 
acceptable to us in this, and not the phenomena. So 
it is the philosophy of pre-existence that renders it 
acceptable to us in this, and on which alone we can, 
with any degree of safety, count upon an endless 
future. Shut and open these senses, including con- 
sciousness, whenever you please, and as often as you 
please, but leave the soul germ intact and perfect, 
and we will maintain eternal life, sleep, and wake 
through eternity and never lose identity, and only 
slough off from the memory that which is useless to 
preserve, or which has performed its uses, and ful- 
filled its mission. 

It may be thought useless, if not improper, to 
introduce this philosophy into this gestation life of 
the soul where very few can appreciate it ; but since 
we hear and read so much about eternal life which is 
so utterly inconsistent with the beginning of exist- 
ence here, we deem it important for those who see as 
we see the inconsistency of our Christian religion on 
this subject to correct its errors as far as possible. 

We are often asked why the spirits who know this 
truth, if it be one, do not teach it to all whom they 
communicate with. We suppose they know many 
tilings they do not communicate to us, probably 
many we are not prepared for, and would not be bene- 
fited by being told; and, indeed, it seems their policy 
to let us find out as many truths as we can by our own 
researches, no doubt realizing that the effort to us is 
useful. Gifts are not as useful as labor-acquired prop- 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 117 

erty. Earn it, and know its value. "Seek, and } T e shall 
find." We feel lhat we have been aided in our efforts 
to satisfy our honest inquiry on this and other sub- 
jects of doubt and difficulty, and, perhaps, as much 
as was consistent with our best interest. Ever grate- 
ful and ever thankful for that spirit guardianship 
which has for many years been our greatest blessing, 
we feel to accept what it gives and not ask more, 
believing our spirit guides know better than we do 
what we deserve and need from them. 

We should add one more Christian item of history 
to our theory of pre-existence in the person of Mary, 
the mother of Jesus, who is by Christian authority 
decided to be immaculate; and as by her history, to 
be found in the apocrj'phal New Testament, she was 
of Divine paternal parentage, the same as Jesus, of 
course, she had also a pre-existence ; and, with little 
doubt, we might as well add Moses and Samson, and 
several other mysterious characters of Jewish history, 
as well as scores of Oriental personages who had no 
earthly paternal parentage, according to their history. 
According to Grecian mythology, the gods gave con- 
tinued or perpetual existence to the children they 
begot of earthly mothers, but did not admit a pre- 
existence, as the Christians do, for their God-begot- 
ten child or children. The Christian is in advance, 
in this respect, although to us both are fabulous, ex- 
cept in the fact of eternal life, or of its being a fact. 

We submit this whole subject to the candid inves- 
tigation of our readers, with the expectation that 
many will at first reject it summarily, and afterward 
recall or accept it, as this has already been our expe- 



118 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

rience in presenting it to friends; but we have the 
fullest assurance that in due time it will be thor- 
oughly canvassed and receive its appropriate recogni- 
tion, clearing away, as it has with us, many heavy 
doubts on the subject of future and eternal life, which, 
in its latter sense, cannot to us be true without this 
theory. 

Edward Beecher, in his theory of pre-existence, 
asserts that once we all were spiritual inhabitants of 
Heaven, and enjoying the perfect bliss of that life, 
but that we joined Satan in his rebellion against God, 
and became totally depraved thereby, and, as con- 
demned rebels, are sent to this state of existence, 
where we maj' accept the atonement, and, for Christ's 
sake, be saved, if we believe in and rely on Him, 
but not knowing our former state, have no induce- 
ments except what the Scripture and church offer, 
and, consequently, very few of us ever get back to 
Heaven, and the rest go to endless perdition, with 
the "nations that forget God." What was the origin 
of that pre-existence he does not tell us. I leave the 
reader to judge between the two systems of pre- 
existence, and accept either or neither. Some of 
the Oriental nations teach that our souls are sent 
into beasts and reptiles of various kinds as a punish- 
ment for sins committed in this life; but all these 
theories bring in a malignant God to sport with our 
misfortunes. Some more rational ancients, and some 
modern writers, believe we are swallowed up at death 
in the Divine essence, losing forever identity and our 
consciousness of being; but as these are beliefs only, 
I leave them. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

INCARNATION AND RE-INCARNATION. 

Admitting the divine incarnation of several an- 
cient persons who have been worshiped as Gods by 
succeeding generations, I extend the principle to all 
persons, both male and female, and to every individ- 
ual of the race, from the "wickedest man in New 
York " to the worshiped Jesus of the Catholic church, 
and find and leave them in all stages and degrees of 
moral, physical, and spiritual development, with the 
Divine germ in each that must, and will, ultimately 
make a Jesus or a Mary of perfection of each. Hence, 
whatsoever we do to benefit or bless these — "the 
least of these " — we do to God, and for God, and it 
becomes a religious act with or without devotional 
feelings. The time has come to recognize this divine 
incarnation in the race instead of partially in one or 
ten of its members. 

Every mortal pair who raise a child should do all 
in their power by fitting themselves, and by care of 
the object, to raise a Mary or a Jesus in perfection of 
body and spirit, and thus build up the race to its 
highest perfection. All efforts would be in the right 
direction, and the race rapidly improve under such 
ordering. If one half the care and good judgment 

(119) 



120 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

were taken in raising children that is taken in rais- 
ing horses or cattle, the improvement would be mani- 
fest at once in a better class of children. 

In our cities and large towns, boys of eight or ten 
years old can be found smoking and chewing tobacco, 
having inherited the depraved appetite from married, 
if not pious, parents, and having no guidance or in- 
struction to avoid the physical and moral deprav- 
ity. These children are equally incarnations with 
Jesus, and their sins are mainly from the earthly 
parents, and have descended through a perverted 
and polluted line of earthly body-makers, but never 
reach the soul germ, or divine Essence, of being which 
will cast off one after another these polluted bodies, 
and at last attain a harmonized condition of finite 
happiness. 

Our greatest errors of judgment lie in measure and 
comparison. We measure with a short-time rule, and 
compare with few specimens, and thus condemn at 
once each guilty sinner to a final destiny, when there 
is no final or ultimate destiny, but a ceaseless round 
of endless change and variety. Even in our own 
life we often see extremes almost meet in the same 
person. 

Christ and the Devil are the two objects which 
theology places at the extremes of character in good- 
ness and wickedness, and on the line between these 
the Christian writers place all human beings, and 
most of them part the race by an imaginary line, and 
send each way the feeble and abused race to final 
and eternal destiny; but these old and superanuated 
teachings are about " played out," and in their stead 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 121 

we must have a rational system of origin and destiny 
for each and all in place of this arbitrary and incon- 
sistent theory; a new answer to the question: "What 
is the chief end of man?" since he positively re- 
fuses to praise and glorify God forever for Christ's 
sake. Organs and bells have been substituted to do 
this in our day, and many other devices may be got up 
to save human effort, and be propelled entirely by 
machinery so as to save all human effort, since we 
are a labor-saving people, and have a germ of the 
Divine ingenuity in us. 

The first incarnation was the first human being on 
earth, and the last the last child born, whether the 
mother was married or not, or even if, like Mary, she 
were married after conception, and immaculate till 
the birth of her first child. 

To the Jew and Christian Adam was the first in- 
carnation of God's breath which made Adam a " liv- 
ing soul," he not being such until he received the 
Divine breath, or spirit of God. The fable says he 
was threatened with death for disobedience, and that 
the body did die, but not on the day it ate, as was 
promised, but that the soul did not die, simply because 
it could not ; so that, as the story runs, the Snake told 
more nearly the truth to Eve than God did to Adam. 
Since Eve was not forbidden to eat, I could never see 
why she should incur the penalty, and not only have 
to die but suffer the pains of child-birth as a conse- 
quence of a sin of disobedience she had never com- 
mitted, for, as the story runs, she was never designed 
as anything more than a " help-meet " for the man ; 
but nature seems to disregard all systems of theology, 



122 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

and to have made man and woman equally with 
souls and bodies subject to death and life, harmony 
and discord: the Divine Essence in each pushing out 
forms, changing and destroying and renewing them 
eternally. 

Of re-incarnation we have not any settled theory. 
There seems to be some object in a life here, and, if 
so, those who die in infancy, or at or before birth, 
certainly do not get the advantage or experience of 
an earth life, by which it would seem that nature is 
thwarted in her designs. From what seems to be 
authentic we learn that these children who lose the 
experiences of earth life exist in the next, or spiritual 
life, but how or when they can be re-incarnated so 
as to get the experience of our earth life and carry it 
to the spiritual, where it would seem to be needful for 
their future growth, we do not know. We are not pre- 
pared to say that nature is thwarted, or that this earth 
life is not a necessary link in the experiences and 
changes of an eternal life, or in the cycle of our earthly 
and solar rounds ; hence we cannot say that in some 
way nature does not bring each soul germ round into 
and through an earthly experience by which it can 
gain the necessary experience of an earthly life. 
Dissertations on this subject are quite common now, 
and in time will, no doubt, settle into a theory that 
may be some time demonstrated, and may substan- 
tiate a re-incarnation against which we have no pre- 
judice, to induce us to reject it before the subject is 
thoroughly canvassed. If there should be a return 
to the earth of those who enter and leave it in 
infancy, of course there would be no memory to 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 123 

link the two together; and if a return after a long 
or short life here had been once endured and suf- 
fered or enjoyed, the utter obliteration of the mem- 
ory-plates would leave little or no chance for even 
fragments to be collected, although some persons do 
assume to remember some part of a former earthly 
existence; jet these persons are not credited more 
than are those who claim to be Christ, or some ficti- 
tious or real person of the past. The evidence being 
wanting that such being as the Christian's Christ 
does or ever did exist, or even that such person as 
their Jesus ever had a real earthly existence ; so the 
evidence is wanting that 'dny one person now living 
on earth in a body of SM&stance ever had a former 
similar body life, and yet it may be true, hence we will 
leave this for further and future investigation. We 
have met several persons who claimed to be a re- 
incarnation of Jesus, and one that claimed to be an 
incarnation of Jehovah, and yet none of them had 
any evidence to give, as not one could do any of the 
mighty works to prove their claims. 

There is a very common error running through the 
public mind that morality is a part of religion ; and 
some may think that the wicked and vicious will be 
sent back to this life to be punished, and it is even 
taught by some that human spirits do return incar- 
nate in animal forms ; but, there being no evidence of 
this, we need not admit it. In fact, morality and relig- 
ion are as distinct as chemistry and astronomy, and it is 
easy to show that some form of religion accepts nearly 
every vice and crime as a part of its religion, — Mor- 
monism adopting polygamy. Sects, strong enough, 



124 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

rob, steal, and murder ; and our sects, most of them, 
sanction and take part in war, which is wholesale mur- 
der and robbery, and not less wicked and immoral than 
if it was without the sanction of laws of nations. 
There is no uniform standard of morality, neither is 
there of religion ; both fluctuate, and are ephemeral, 
being popular and unpopular by turns. The morals 
of the Bible are the most corrupt of any known to 
enlightened nations, and have caused more murders 
and wickedness than any other so-called religious 
code, if not than all other causes known, and as we 
progress in civilization, we gradually ignore and re- 
ject them. 

We cannot rely on our feelings or desires to estab- 
lish any theory or truth in nature ; but if I was, as 
an individual, to express my choice in this re-incarna- 
tion theory, I should say : Let me come back and go 
round again with the advantages and experiences 
gained in this trial life ; but, if I am to lose them all, 
and take my chances as I have in this, with no more 
knowledge or experience to guide, I should beg to 
be excused from another trial of earthly vicissitudes. 
There is no doubt a fixed and inexorable law, and 
we must submit to it nolens volens, and run in the 
groove our ceaseless rounds of cyclic changes in eter- 
nal life. There is no power of annihilation in exist- 
ence, and whatever is is, and we are, and are to be, and 
to be pushed along the endless line of being, whatever 
we will, or declare we will not, do. If any theory of 
re-incarnation is true, the number of human inhabi- 
tants on earth increases, and some immigrants, or 
new creations, are constantly coming to make up the 



ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 125 

increase; and some, surely, must get through and 
take their final departure from our planet. So, our 
theory would not be spoiled if re-incarnation should 
be ultimately proved true. 

Since writing the foregoing pages, I have seen 
some published ideas, the gist of which is the same 
as I have expressed in this work, and yet differing in 
one essential particular. Their author teaches that 
the spirit is objective, and the forms subjective only, 
and hence not material ; holding the theory of Bishop 
Berkeley, that what we call matter has no real ex- 
istence. To me both seem to be material, essence posi- 
tive, and substance negative, and each acting and re- 
acting on the other. Hence objective and subjective 
would hardly apply to what I call existence in those 
varied forms. In the case of the mirage, the picture 
may in one sense be said to be subjective, because it 
is produced by and from the background, and yet it 
really is material, for if there was no matter where 
it appears, it could not appear to our vision. This 
may be a better illustration of what we daily see and 
feel in our outer life than the theory of objective and 
subjective. The background of our being sets out 
the forms in which we appear; though both are mate- 
rial, but one is eternal in individual existence, and 
the other ephemeral in form, yet eternal in particled 
material. 

Familiar illustrations of inferior and superior con- 
ditions of matter are before us daily. The potent 
power of steam is in the water, or it could not be 
produced from it. The alcohol is in the grain and 



126 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 

fruit, or it could not be extracted. In our California 
wine-cellars they put wine in the still and pump 
brandy or alcohol out. We watch with interest the 
curling smoke as it rises in clouds from the chimney, 
and in a short time, and at a short distance, it 
entirely disappears. Where has it gone ? Not a 
particle has been lost. It is somewhere still, and 
forming an active part of the air. We press the life 
and soul out of organic bodies as we press the wine 
and brandy from the grain or grape, but we no more 
destroy the one than the other. The elements are 
as real that propel the living organism of man and 
beast as the subtle elements in the grain and fruit, 
or in the seed germ that starts new forms in the 
vegetable world. The air we breathe is filled with 
elements that even the chemist cannot detect, and 
that no retort can hold. It is time we recognized 
the existence and potency of this soul of things that 
appear and disappear before our limited vision. 



